Sign Up For A Delhi Workshop Exploring The Intersection Of Motherhood & Artistic Labour

The stories we are often told about motherhood tend to sit at extreme ends of a narrow spectrum. One version suggests that a woman, upon becoming a mother, must surrender her selfhood and creative ambitions at the altar of care. The other romanticises motherhood as the only path to a full and meaningful life as a woman. Both narratives are reductive, and neither does justice to the complexity of maternal experience or the plurality of womanhood.

Motherhood is not a loss of identity, nor is it an automatic fulfilment of it. It is a condition that complicates, expands, and reshapes the self. And for artists who are also mothers, this reshaping often seeps into their creative practice. How does one tend to a child and a canvas at once? What happens when care becomes both subject and structure in art making?

These are the questions that form the heart of Module 1: Self, Motherhood and Art Making — a series of four workshops led by Dr. Ruchika Wason Singh as part of her ongoing project, A.M.M.A.A. (The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia). Created as an extension of this larger archival endeavour, the workshops offer an intimate space for artist-mothers to gather, reflect, and share. Through storytelling, sensory exercises, and performative dialogues, participants explore the overlaps between studio practice, maternal labour, and the inner life of the artist.

Importantly, this is not simply a support group or a professional forum; it is a method; a way to look with others rather than at them. The workshop framework foregrounds anecdotal inquiry and co-witnessing, allowing maternal experience to emerge as both knowledge and aesthetic material.

The workshops are rooted in A.M.M.A.A., a project conceived by Singh in 2016 to document the creative expressions of mother-artists across Asia. Motivated by her own journey of negotiating art-making and caregiving, Singh saw a glaring absence of such documentation within the region. A.M.M.A.A. has since grown into a digital archive and community space, built on the belief that visibility and mapping are acts of care in themselves.

Singh’s work invites us to consider the maternal not as a departure from art but as a fertile ground for it. In doing so, she expands the vocabulary around both motherhood and artistic labour, offering a more expansive, embodied, and inclusive understanding of what it means to create and to care.

Apply for the workshop here and follow Dr Ruchika Wason Singh here.

If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:

Steph Wilson’s ‘Sonam’ Challenges Stereotypes Of South Asian Motherhood

5 Indian Films That Depict The Joys, Struggles, & Complexities Of South Asian Motherhood

Sundance Winning 'Girls Will Be Girls' Depicts The Emotional Tightrope Of Young Motherhood