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 that quietly accumulate around a life lived in care.
This spring, caregivers gathered with Fierce Mamas to begin building the Scroll of Medical Entanglements — a collaborative community art project created from the administrative debris of caregiving across complex medical needs, disability, mental health, substance use, and elder care.
People 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 caregivers can understand.
“Somewhere between the denial letters and the expired appointment reminders, a community started forming.”
Together, we spread it across tables and floors. We redacted what needed protecting. We witnessed each other’s experiences. We made art from the paper trail.
What we experienced together was the power of witnessing without requiring translation.
People understood 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.
The Scroll is becoming an evolving, traveling community artwork — something that will continue to grow over the coming months through future Gatherings, workshops, and public installations. Each new layer adds to a larger archive of what caregiving systems ask families to hold.
But this is more than an art project.
It is an archive of invisible labor.
A record of navigational burden.
A witness to the ways caregiving reshapes time, finances, relationships, work, identity, and the rhythms of daily life.
It also makes visible something caregivers often know deeply but experience in isolation: that many of the struggles we carry are structural, not personal failures.
At Fierce Mamas, story is part of how we do this work.
Story helps us make meaning. It helps us build connection. It helps us honor what is often unseen.
The stories centered here belong to caregivers. The people we love hold their own voices, experiences, and sovereignty. We hold that boundary with care and respect.
Over the coming months, the Scroll will continue to evolve through additional workshops, exhibitions, and community participation opportunities. We hope it becomes both a public artwork and a growing record of caregiving realities that are too often hidden inside homes, filing cabinets, hospital portals, glove compartments, backpacks, and kitchen drawers.
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.