Peace Paper Project hosts 'Clothesline Project Pulping' event, spreads message of 'surviving'

The Peace Paper Project hosted a "Clothesline Project Pulping" event on the patio of the HUB-Robeson Center Wednesday.

The event was part of the Gender Equity Center’s and the University Park Undergraduate Association’s events for Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

According to founder Drew Matott, the Peace Paper Project was established in 2011 “as a way to merge the traditional hand papermaking practices in the art therapy, and socially engaged art communities.”

Currently, Matott said the Peace Paper Project works “in direct collaboration with the [art] therapy community to run papermaking programs that help individuals overcome their traumatic experiences.”

Participants practiced traditional papermaking and made prints from shirts made during previous Clothesline Project events.

“We've documented [the shirts], photographed them, and archived them, and then we're transforming them into paper pulp, and then reforming them into sheets of paper,” Mattot said. “So it's a form of recycling, but it's also a form of community engagement and empowerment.”

Becca Geiger, the associate director of the Gender Equity Center, said the Clothesline Project is “a national project” where “individuals take T-shirts and write stories of maybe experiences of sexual violence, intimate partner violence and assault.”

Others can also write “messages of support.”

According to Geiger, Penn State has been participating in the Clothesline Project since the 1990s, and some of the shirts made during previous projects were “no longer in great display condition.”

“We really wanted a way to still honor those individuals, but in a different way,” Geiger said. “And I think this is really a perfect way to do that.”

The event also included local business, Jabebo Earrings, with owner and artist Kevin Abbott. The business makes earrings out of recycled cereal boxes donated by the community.

“I didn’t know about the Peace Paper Project until they reached out to us,” Abbott said. “We’re happy to participate because we like to do events.”

Abbott’s business set up a table near Peace Paper Project’s papermaking station, where participants could mold animals out of paper pulp.

The business also had a bicycle attached to a blender, where participants could turn cardboard pieces into pulp by pushing the pedals on the bicycle.

“[The event]’s been a blast,” Abbott said. “It’s really cool to see people doing fun things, and it’s nice to be a part of it – part of our overall messaging.”

Professor and PhD student in art education and women’s, gender and sexuality studies Brandi Lewis brought one of her classes to the pulping event after learning about it through Penn State’s women’s, gender and sexuality studies department.

“Basically, the class that I teach is diversity, pedagogy and visual culture, and we're looking at artistic ways of social justice activism,” Lewis said. “And [this event is] a real world example. In class, we kind of talk theoretically about what artists are doing, but this is a way that they can do that activism themselves.”

For Lewis, she said she “loves how [Peace Paper Project] is approaching” certain subjects.

“I love how they are giving care and attention to particular issues, like focusing on intimate partner violence, [and] focusing on helping veterans process trauma,” Lewis said. “The mix of care and making is really what brought me in.”

One of Lewis’ students, Taylor Pierce, said “it was actually a lot of fun,” making paper at today’s event.

Pierce (sophomore–computer science) also said she thinks the pulping event’s message “means something about surviving.”

“It's all old shirts from people who shared their own experiences with sexual assault and harassment,” Pierce said. “The fact that they're being repurposed into something good shows that you can survive and go past it.”

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