The Art of Birth Care

María del Mar and María José Rincón are twin ceramists born in Colombia. Through their collaborative project Ayasham, they explore their connection to their ancestral roots, using clay as a way to remember, reconnect, and honor where they come from.

Their work brings together Western sculptural and traditional/ancestral techniques, reflecting their own experience of migration and the blending of cultures. Through this process, they create a space where the past and present meet, allowing stories, traditions, and knowledge passed down through generations to find new life.

The materials they work with are deeply connected to the meaning behind their practice. Clay comes from the earth, water gives it form, and fire transforms it in the firing. Working with clay is more than making sculpture — it is a way of returning to their origins and building a deeper connection to their ancestry.

The placenta is our first home: a connection between mother and child, a source of nourishment, and a reminder of our earliest bond with the earth and the cycles of life.

When creating a placenta vessel by hand, we connect with clay as a medium for memory, connection, and remembrance. In many traditions this is a process of reciprocity with the land. These vessels serve as a container for life, a keeper of stories, and a place for offerings.

As we connect with this earth material, we allow our hands to guide us through shaping, opening, and forming a vessel. Each curve and imprint holds the trace of the hands that made it. The vessel becomes an ofrenda, an offering shaped with care and intention — whether created to honor a birth, remember a loved one, or reconnect with our ancestry.

Raised in rural Canada on Sinixt Territory. She earned her Emergency Medical Responder license and spent her young adult life working on ambulance and in harm-reduction clinics, before returning to the methodical, meditative handwork of her Waldorf upbringing. At the Kootenay School of the Arts she deepened her sewing, learned plant dyes, and began weaving on floor looms. She believes in the connection between head, heart, and hands.

Knowing the terrain and dynamics of our bodies — the anatomy and the physiology — is all of our responsibility. We connect with the first organ of our genesis, the placenta, to learn its structure and function, to meet its mystery and its power, and to craft one from natural fibers and the pulse of our hands.

Indiana was born and raised in Costa Rica by women; many were single mothers. She looks towards them for strength and inspiration. Indiana grew up on a horse ranch in Montezuma, on the coast of the Nicoya Peninsula. Her childhood was immersed in tropical dry-forests, echoes of howler monkeys, warm Pacific waters, and the enveloping darkness of the night. Nature, plants, and animals are her friends and teachers.

Indiana is an interdisciplinary artist with a B.A. in Human Ecology. Her work focuses on themes of intergenerational trauma, birth, regeneration, and storytelling. In her most recent project, Birth Story, she travelled to countries in Latin America, Europe, and Africa hopeful to open a collective memory of birth. Along the way, she interviewed women about their experiences of giving birth and learned from traditional and home birth midwives.

Making art is about expression. About connecting to a deeper part of ourselves that is beyond words, and creating images without expectations. Through this kind of exploration, we can uncover parts of ourselves that were previously unknown.

During our session, we will explore the concept of self-portrait through the medium of watercolor. A portrait is about giving face to who we are through a moment in time, and revealing what is raw beneath the surface. To make this self-portrait, we will connect back to our spirit before it took human form, our birth, how we have been shaped in our world, and the elemental guardians that have kept watch over us.

tamate uta is a birth and death worker, drum keeper, and artist devoted to the mending of ancestral lineage and culture. she specializes in facilitating rites of passage ceremonies for those who have experienced abortions and miscarriages, drawing from the buddhist/shinto practice of mizuko kuyo, or water baby ceremony.

she is the director of a magical realist documentary visual album called Kizuna, about the spirit of an aborted baby born into a taiko drum and the unbreakable bonds between people, earth and stars. she works with a collective of silkworm farmers in rural japan to restore the relationship between traditional fiber and birth arts. she lives between the territories of ainu and ohlone people — miyagi prefecture, japan, and the bay area, california.

tending the astral umbilical is a grief arts practice focused on honoring the spirits of babies who become ancestors via abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth. in this session, uta will guide participants through the arc of a ritual grief alchemization process, a journey that can span months, years, lifetimes.

engaging with the technology of twisting and braiding grass, we will create a blueprint of how ritual and ceremony can bring necessary catharsis, release, punctuation, witness, integration, and celebration to an experience of birth that is often neglected in our modern culture. you will learn to relate with the unborn as wise ancestors on the other side of the river that flows between life and death, awaiting our loving attention in order to activate the potential of our interdimensional relationship.

Monica is a Zainichi Korean / Canadian based in rural Japan. She works with traditional food skills and land-based practices to move in rhythm with the seasons, centering the hearth as a space where food, community, ritual, and ancestral remembrance become everyday medicine.

A birth guardian and postpartum care provider, Monica’s practice is rooted in traditional East Asian womb-tending practices and folk medicine, shaped by her cultural lineage, deepened over the last eight years since returning to her motherland of Japan, and expanded through studies in Thailand. She sees the mother as part of a larger ecosystem of body, community, and land — and tends to these interconnected layers through womb, pregnancy, birth and the postpartum.

Many of us don’t inherit intact food traditions. Sometimes, we inherit food memories. And sometimes, we even need to create those memories ourselves, together, weaving them intentionally into our kitchens as recipes we can one day pass on to the next generation.

Together, we’ll make dumplings from scratch, one of the oldest forms of comfort food, born from the simple act of rolling out dough and filling it with nourishment. As we work with our hands, we’ll reflect on food as a vessel for memory, connection, and cultural continuity. Because dumplings, like so many meaningful foods, are rarely made alone. They are made together, with busy hands and stories shared.

Catherine is a mother of five who rediscovered her roots through the ancestral art of cooking. She does not call herself a chef — though she has trained in holistic nutrition, postpartum nutrition, and professional cooking, her greatest teachings came from observing and cooking alongside her grandparents and elders, and bringing those lessons to her family, to postpartum mothers, and to her community. She feels connected to the archetype of la cocinera, the matriarchal cook who keeps the stories, traditions, and recipes of a people.

Cooking has lost its magic to convenience and speed, and that loss follows us into everyday life — especially as mothers, moving quicker and missing the sacred moments that live in what is believed to be mundane. In this foodways class we relearn that the kitchen, the heart of the home, is far from mundane.

Catherine’s work is to reawaken our connection to our terroir, our first mother, so that in the many movements of motherhood we keep a tether to where we are from, where we are, and where we are going. The food holds our grandparents’ prayers for the nourishment of generations they would never meet; the seeds, the roots, the herbs, the technique, the fire — all of it still speaks, and still heals.

Ana was born in Venezuela and has been dancing since she could toddle around. Her movement practice shifted into a more refined and targeted direction after beginning to train martial arts a couple of years after the birth of her last daughter.

Ana and her family live and farm on the West Coast of Central Florida. She homeschools her two daughters and tends to her home universe.

In our time together, we will walk through a body tending session where the physical internal guardians of the birth process are highlighted:

• The ribs
• The abdomen
• The pelvic floor

We will uncover the structures integral to the support of gestation and their inter-functionality, as well as the foundations of effective movement.

The somatic movement portion will include:

• Warm up & drop in
• Targeted rehabilitative moves for the respiratory muscles, deep core, and pelvic floor functions
• Strength & conditioning
• Cool down & come to

The closing will be a self-massage with a focus on rehydrating fascia and releasing tension of the face, chest, and shoulders.

Yoga and meditation instructor, multidisciplinary artist, co-founder of Good Juju and a Nike Well Collective Trainer. Raised between the East Coast and the Middle East, she graduated from the New School and has studied Meridian Yoga Therapy, Jivamukti’s Spiritual Warrior, and completed 200-hour meditation and yoga teacher trainings at Three Jewels NYC. Her classes centre breath, intuitive movement, and music — offering tools for common gestational discomforts.

Undulation is one of the most primal movements of life — the motion of protozoa and the single-celled beings we were before we were anything else, the motion of water itself.

We connect with that movement to bring life-force circulation, warmth, oxygen, and feeling into our pelvic bowls, activating the deeper proprioception that is vital in birth, and the power and wisdom held in the sacrum.