Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The Earl Project is a community-based project with veterans, soldiers, family members, and survivors that promotes wellness and creativity through burn-out art workshops, using fire, collage, photocopy, and bleach color burn-out on fabric to tell their story, usually in non-objective, abstract ways. Participants take home individual works and contribute to a community war stories cloth scroll inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry. Using burn-out techniques with mending stitches as both metaphor and realization of healing in a physical manifestation, they transform lived experience into art. The project is scheduled for two exhibitions to date (2019, 2020) of the community scroll and individual works, offering a site-specific and digital museum experience of the workshops. One goal of the project is to complicate the common representations of military experience, to render the personal as part of the larger human story seen from multiple viewpoints, and to serve as non-partisan document of twenty-first life that extends beyond the polarization of divisive religious and political ideologies. The Earl Project uses current technologies in production (digital printing on cloth) and on-line digital dissemination as it retains an ancient technology - stitched cloth. With ongoing photographic documentation and expansion of the marginalized communities working on the scroll, sections will be digitally stitched together on-line and presented on The Earl Project website and on multiple websites of participating museums and workshop institutional venues for a global audience. The community-owned scroll will eventually find a museum home, offering new conversations regarding intellectual property in social-practice art projects.