Maria grew up outside Copenhagen in Denmark, attending a Waldorf School, where an emphasis is placed on art and creativity as an underlying theme throughout the whole curriculum.  This background, combined with her inherent love of colour, texture, and a strong desire to create, remain integral to her arts practice.

Her curious mind and enjoyment of travel led to many trips to Australia.  Moving permanently to Australia in 2003, settling in the Clare Valley in South Australia, where on her small acreage she managed a mob of sheep and alpacas initially to keep the grass in check. A gift of a spinning wheel led to Maria processing the fibres from her flock. Two crucial pages in a book on fibre craft covered the basics of felting, she quickly became consumed with this new way of creating.  Initially making utilitarian, wearable items, for markets and galleries around South Australia. As her skills developed and broadened, she began to create works that expressed her ideas and concepts, and in 2016 her first large felt sculpture was created.

Living rurally, inspiration and natural resources were never far away, and soon new materials found their way into her art pieces, animal bones, fencing wire, timber, and handmade paper.

Curiosity to try out new techniques and materials that could be paired with felt to create an interplay and tension with the duality of the materials chosen led to a Regional Australian Art grant in 2020. This enabled her to learn metal working processes under the guidance of a chosen mentor, Kangaroo Island artist Deb Sleeman.  Part-way through her metal working internship, her family moved to the Huon Valley (Tasmania), where she now lives and practices.

Her connection to the land is evident through her artwork, as it is often inspired by the geometry found in nature – the complex shape and forms of a seed pod or flower, leaves being whirled around by the wind, or the growing concern of the change in our climate.

With the new and very different surrounding, compared to the warmer and drier climate of South Australia,  Tasmania has given opportunities to explore and respond to a varying natural world of fungi, ferns and old growth forests. The quality of light from early morning water vistas to the late night thrill of Aurora hunting now provides new directions and inspiration.