TCNJ

30 The College of New Jersey Magazine For the past 15 years, Mackie's time spent by the water's edge and the impact of global warming on the resource have together influenced her artwork. An interdisciplinary artist, Mackie often works with handmade paper, creating different textures and dying the paper many shades of blue to represent moving water. Her concern about glacier loss in the eastern Alps and her studies along the shores of England and Cuba resulted in art projects that have been exhibited nationally and internationally over the course of the last decade. Mackie lives outside Frenchtown, New Jersey, near the Delaware River, an often tranquil, sometimes violent body of water that has served as muse for some of her most recent projects. During her time in isolation due to the pandemic, she took "hours and hours" of video of the river. This past summer, she and students Nicole Molnar '23 and Michaela Moran '24 pored over the video for creative inspiration. The students learned Mackie's pa- per-making techniques (a challenging undertaking that involves lots and lots of water) and spent the summer with their fingernails dyed blue. "The beau- tiful colors and patterns we saw in the water videos impacted our choices in creating the paper," says Moran. One of Mackie's works, The Delaware River, is an immersive experience with 17 minutes of video projected onto a large, white, sculpt- ed board. "You can move all the way around it," says Mackie, "so you become part of the piece." Molnar and Moran formed the board based on composition and bal- ance that would create interest when images were projected onto it. But the energy of the water was also evident. "The form does have a resemblance to the water and its waves," says Moran. The Delaware River was recent- ly accepted into the prestigious International Biennial for Paper Fibre Art in Taiwan, a five-month-long exhibition that opens in November. Among the 44 artists represented in the biennial, only six are American. "We can help others to think about the impact humans have on the Delaware River by offering a visual reminder that we are directly inter- twined with nature," says Moran. "I hope when people look at the pieces, they see the beauty that inspired our choices and then have a sense of urgency to protect that beauty." Elizabeth Mackie in Frenchtown, New Jersey Precious resource depicters

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