Raghvi Bhatia

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theglassmakersclub@gmail.com

Raghvi Bhatia grew up in New Delhi before she moved to the United States to study at RISD. Raghvi was awarded a prestigious residency at the Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass, where she focused on her work on small glass seed beads. Prior to the residency in Corning, Bhatia took a class at UrbanGlass (the arts nonprofit that publishes the Hot Sheet) and got to know the New York glass community. She also was chosen for a residency at Ox-Bow. Raghvi lives in New York and Delhi.

I hail from Delhi, a city once famous for religious pluralism that is exponentially growing more sectarian. I have witnessed firsthand how integral aspects of society, including ritual, ceremony, sacred spaces and community gathering are wielded by organised religion. Through my practice, I recognise that institutional religion does not own these moments. I have developed my artistic practice as a religious sect, an offshoot of contemporary art, to salvage these aspects of life.

My personal investment in craft has rooted my sect in material. The three saints of my sect are material manifestations of recurring elements across religions. They are – Glass (manifestation of Light and Purity), Skin (Self and Labour) and Water (Ablution and Ritual). As part of my sect, I have created a sacred language, a new craft and ritual objects, based on these saints. The sacred language I have created is based on Zellige, a Moorish mosaic craft wherein glazed tiles are individually chiselled into one of 1300 distinct shapes. All shapes have specific names, and fit into one-another in multiple ways to create thousands of patterns. I have assembled a lexicon of these names to translate Zellige patterns into poetry. Employing each shape as a logogram, the resulting sacred language has a uniquely non-linear syntax, like the radial patterns of Zellige.