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9 Prairie WINTER 2022 PETER MURPHY 9 Prairie WINTER 2022 Inspired by monks who would wear Bibles around their necks, Elizabeth Mackie has long been interested in the idea of wearable art, particularly books. "Books are precious," she says. "Something you keep close." Mackie made her own first attempt at a wearable book more than a decade ago when she printed words and definitions on fabric and stitched it together to form a neckpiece (left). "It was a dictionary of all the negative terminology that refers to women," she says. When she started teaching a Book Arts class to art and art education majors, Mackie assigned the project as a way for students to relate to a book in a different way. "We do a lot of folding at first, and looking at structures," she says. "But the wearable books lead students to be creative with their process and get used to handling paper and what paper can do." Here, her students turn heads (and pages) as they get a Vogue moment to share their fashionable fiction. — Kara Pothier Fine arts professor Elizabeth Mackie asks students to create wearable books. The results: Fashion fit for the style pages. A bove the fold Artist (above): Briana Titus '23 "I kept gravitating toward making a skirt because I was interested in how the paper would move with my body. I found a book in the free section of the library called Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, which I felt correlated well with the idea of making a feminine piece of clothing. I sewed the folded book pages together with thread."

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