Care Leaves Traces
The Scroll of Medical Entanglements
A Fierce Mamas Community Art Project
There are forms of caregiving labor that rarely become visible in public.
Not the appointments themselves, but the machinery around them:
The bills that arrive months later.
The EOBs that explain nothing.
The denial letters.
The contradictory instructions.
The binders, folders, portals, codes, reminders, invoices, applications, renewals, appeals, and stacks of paper (SO.MUCH.PAPER.) that quietly accumulate around a life lived in care.
The Scroll of Medical Entanglements is a collaborative community art project created from those traces.
The Scroll is being created through Gather, a Fierce Mamas community practice hosted in partnership with ShapeShifter Art.
ShapeShifter provides the creative space, materials, guidance, and permission to experiment. Gather is not an art class and it is not a support group. It is a place to use making as a way of noticing, processing, connecting, and revealing what often stays hidden.
No art experience is needed.
The work is in the noticing. The making. The conversation that happens when our hands are busy and our stories begin to overlap.
Together, we are building a growing archive from the paperwork and objects left behind by navigating complicated systems: disability, medical care, mental health, substance use, education, elder care, and all the places where care becomes tangled.
Bring what you’re ready to release.
You are invited to contribute pieces of your own paper trail:
medical bills
insurance letters
explanations of benefits (EOBs)
denial notices
appointment reminders
prescriptions or medication paperwork
hospital documents
IEPs, evaluations, or school forms
applications, renewals, and appeals
calendars, lists, notes, and the everyday evidence of managing care
Bring the folder you keep meaning to sort. The papers you saved because “what if we need this someday?” The things that somehow survived every attempt to clean out the drawer.
Or bring nothing at all.
We always have materials available, and everyone is welcome to participate.
“Somewhere between the denial letters and the expired appointment reminders, a community started forming.”
What happens at a Scroll Gathering?
We slow down.
We look closely at the language and systems that shape caregiving experiences.
We redact what needs protecting.
We highlight what deserves attention.
We tear, layer, stitch, glue, and transform.
Usually, these documents are designed to be read by systems: insurance companies, agencies, hospitals, schools.
The Scroll asks:
What happens when we read them together?
What do they reveal about what caregivers carry?
From paperwork to witness.
When the Scroll began, caregivers arrived carrying bags, folders, boxes, and armfuls of paperwork they had held onto long after its usefulness had passed.
Some of it was absurd.
Some heartbreaking.
Some darkly funny in the way only people who have lived inside these systems can understand.
Somewhere between the denial letters and expired appointment reminders, a community started forming.
People recognized each other through the paperwork alone.
There was relief in not having to explain the absurdity of a six-page denial letter, an impossible bill, or a stack of forms kept for years out of pure survival instinct.
What had felt private and isolating became collective once it was laid out in the open.
More Than Art
The Scroll is an archive of invisible labor — a record of the paperwork, decisions, waiting, advocating, and navigating that happen behind the scenes of care.
By making these traces visible, we begin to recognize what belongs to us individually and what belongs to systems we can change.
Story as Practice
At Fierce Mamas, story helps us make meaning, find patterns, and build connection.
We center caregiver experiences while honoring that the people we love hold their own stories, voices, and sovereignty.
Follow the Scroll
The Scroll will continue to grow through Gather workshops, community contributions, and public installations.
This fall, the evolving Scroll will be included in an exhibition by artist Joann Self Selvidge at The Medicine Factory, bringing these often-private experiences of care into a shared public space.
Follow the Scroll
If you’d like to participate in future Scroll workshops, exhibitions, Gatherings, or related projects, we’d love to stay connected.
Join our email list to hear about upcoming events, collaborative art builds, caregiver storytelling projects, and future opportunities to contribute to the Scroll.