About the Artist

Marianne has been making these sculptures since 2000.

They started one shell stacked on another, a small character emerging on the studio table. Some of those first pieces she eventually took apart and rebuilt — pieces returned to the studio table, recombined into something better. Farmers Market in the launch began as one of those, in 2000.

Each one built from what the tide has left behind — sea urchin shells, sea glass, ghost netting, lobster bands, seaweed — gathered along the New England coast where Marianne walks.

What they take is everything that came before: a lifetime of working as an artist, twenty-six years of building this collection in particular, the kind of eye that walks a beach and sees a fly fisherman in a stack of shells.

The original sculptures stay in the studio. Marianne photographs each one herself — the angle, the light, the composition all chosen by the same eye that built the sculpture in the first place. The photograph is how she wants you to see what she has made. It's the only way the sculpture can leave the studio at all.

Those photographs become wearable and useful art: recycled canvas tote bags, flour sack tea towels, aprons, and giclée art prints. The original sculpture stays. The artist's vision travels with you.

Lil Urchins Studio is the gathering of all of it — work that has existed for over two decades, finally photographed and shared.

Nothing is taken alive. Every material was already left behind by the tide.