ARTIST -IN- RESIDENCY - RAMAA SHARMA ON HERITAGE, MOTHERHOOD AND AI

Ramaa Sharma was our Artist-in-residence for two weeks in July and August 2025 for the Time Capsule project and for South Asian Heritage Month. She is a mixed media artist and an AI consultant.

Intentions

During the residency Ramaa explored her heritage in the context of becoming a new mother. She wanted to be intentional about what she passed on to her mixed race child. She also chose to experiment with AI tools, conscious that they are trained on biased datasets and mindful of the impact this can have when working with complex and ‘minority’ identities. She began by drafting a short manifesto setting the tone for how she planned to work and framed the questions she hoped to answer about her practice and heritage.

Centring heritage

Ramaa spent two weeks immersed in her South Asian heritage in a way she is not in daily life. She ate foods usually reserved for special festivals and listened to a wide range of South Asian music from Qwalli, Bhangra to Classical. On visiting her mum and seeing her pray with her own child she remembered how religious her own upbringing had been.  She remembered the lyrics of the devotional songs of the time, playing the sitar as well as teaching children Hindi. Ramaa also returned to the Indian shops she would visit with her parents. Although they have evolved considerably since then, she could still buy beautiful rich fabrics, ribbons and rakhis, the special bracelets used to celebrate the Indian festival of Raksha Bandhan.

One returning to her studio, she started using these materials and integrating these textures into her collages. This along with copper foil, magazines and acrylic paint. The process became a way to test new ideas and to embody and respond to the questions she had set herself at the start. 

‘Heritage practices’

Throughout the residency she contemplated the elements of her heritage that she once loved and still loves yet had become distant from. The elements which were deeply integrated now, such as the love for Indian cuisine. Ramaa and her husband still cook and enjoy Indian food at home. She also considered the parts she had deliberately discarded. These were the ideas and customs that felt oppressive, such as the ones about how women should behave and who they must become. Illustration became a method of surfacing and brainstorming conflicts, changes and new ideas. Including the concept of ‘heritage practices’ she also observed how it is the women that also appear to the ‘carriers’ of heritage too.

Workshopping

In week one of the residency Ramaa led a Heritage and AI workshop. Participants reflected on their own heritage, expressed it through collage, then wrote prompts for an AI image tool. An unexpected moment came when a Punjabi participant asked for an image of a Punjabi family. The system returned a picture featuring a person in a turban commonly associated with men and some women of the Sikh faith. Neither the participant nor Ramaa are Sikh, which made the result surprising. Punjab has a large Sikh population, yet it also includes Hindus, Muslims and Christians. As statistical systems, AI models often default to datasets that capture populations in terms of numbers rather than the rich cultural landscapes of places. The data also mirrors real world biases.

Data, labelling and separations

The incident stirred a personal memory. Ramaa’s mother grew up in Punjab in a Hindu Punjabi family. She would often recall celebrating Diwali and Vaisakhi together with friends. They would visit each other’s places of worship and join each other’s rituals as well. Ramaa’s mother did not realise this was unusual until she moved to Britain. Later, when Ramaa would attend an after school Punjabi class, this difference would play out for her to experience. A Sikh child asked her why she, as a Hindu, was learning Punjabi. 

The incident left a bigger impression on Ramaa than she had realised.  Perhaps it was because the question came from a child who also looked like her. It also made her wonder whether this was in part an unconscious reason she was struggling to pass on Punjabi to her son, who because of his mixed race heritage would also bring an additional level of difference in such a situation.  

Complexity & Intersecting Identities 

The moment also brought clarity about what it means to be a so called ‘minority’ within a minority. The image of a woman, part merged and part emergent, in an Indian sari without a blouse was produced around this time. An image that appears to depict a woman of many worlds part insider, part outsider and thus inevitably rebellious.  

Resolving

Towards the end of the residency, the work began to move from the illustrative to the abstract,  the complexity of heritage now more understood and conveyed in a more felt sense. The final piece is an image of a face that emerged when Ramaa worked with acrylic on canvas. Using the collages as inspiration, the face she has produced is bold, armour-like, deeply layered, which she says represents the multitude of identities, the qualities of such intersections and the impact of being all that she is.  

“The residency has been a deeply moving and nourishing experience. It was really telling that it felt very exciting to be centering my South Asian heritage at this moment in time. Having been born and raised in London it has not been my default mode of operating.   This single invitation opened a world I hadn’t attended solely for quite some time (if at all). The space to be, to contemplate and make was such a privilege at this particular juncture in my life and I believe it was instrumental to developing my practice as well as the direction it will now take. To my own surprise, it also answered the tricksy question I had set at the start: what would I share about my heritage with my son? 

It emerged that this sharing will come more from being than teaching. It will come from embodying all that I am and what I have embraced about being Panjabi and a Londoner as well as what I have invented by residing in the “in between.”

I trust the more comfortable I am in embracing all that I am, the more at ease he will be in all that he is and will become.”

Ramaa Sharma. August 2025