Marianne grew up in a very small, isolated farming village in Switzerland. From a very young age my life was centered around working on our farm. At sixteen, she moved into Bern, received a standard business education, and began working as a telephone operator and then as a wholesale buyer. At age twenty-five I travelled to the States. When she arrived in Berkeley, she met a group of people who were very active in the East Bay arts community. For the first time an arts-related career seemed to be a possibility. Within a year of arriving in Northern California, she had secured an apprenticeship with a goldsmith and soon after began working as a full-time goldsmith and jeweler.
In 1987 Marianne began to draw, and some time later she was given an old easel and a decrepit paint box still containing paint, brushes, and mediums. This gift was the beginning of a transformed life, as if that very box were a magical vessel in which to travel. To this day it holds her curiosity, and with it she discovers something new almost every day-she only has to open it!
Marianne often changes medium and scale in her work to retain a creative tension. She will move through a period of intense printing to months of painting. At times she puts down those tools and uses only stick and ink. Throughout all her work she is pulling from visions which she now realizes were initially generated from life in a physically and mentally isolated landscape.
The first glimpse of a new piece enters her mind in moments of wandering thought and often begins as a simple, gestural sketch. The images evolve from these dreams into stage-like settings, part storyteller’s fairy tale, part real-time tale of daily survival. She focuses on the forces beneath the surface-the dread, the frenzy, isolation, fear, separation, love, intimacy, hope, humor, whimsy. The setting down of these imaginations is both a sifting through and a building of a visual diction, setting one piece upon another as one would set down one word after another in a narrative.