Raghvi Bhatia

New Delhi, India

Art on view at the Bellevue Arts Museum

Raghvi Bhatia is an artist who considers the artistic experience as analogous to rituals: of searching for the sacred, of visiting religious institutions, and of questioning existence. Originally from New Delhi, India, Bhatia earned a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design where she developed her artistic practice as a religious sect. Her ascetic and aesthetic philosophies explore similarities between glass, skin, and water—materials that are at once enduring and fragile.

Energy Frame #4

The Energy Frames series taps into the three-thousand-year-old glass practice of pulling tubes and chopping them to create glass seed beads. The imagery in this series draws from the complex geography and history of the beads, their association with textiles, and their connection to ritual objects. Each piece frames a void—drawing upon the incomplete history of the bead as a unit of time, labor, violence, and faith.