Creating plein-air landscape paintings was always a hobby and after several years of living in Scotland and then Normandy she returned to London in 1981 and enrolled at Goldsmiths' College of Art. There she was introduced to many media but was immediately seduced by clay with all its expressive possibilities. Marea went on to major in ceramic arts at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, where clay was regarded as a fine-art material.

During this period Marea was still a painter looking to expand her skills and her clay pieces began to be vehicles for colored mark-making related to painting.

In 1991 Marea moved to Keswick in England's beautiful Lake District and set up a studio. Now she had the luxury of time to explore the technical side of ceramics and her obsession with glaze chemistry lead naturally to a small business making custom adorned with color and texture. Of course, surrounded again by magnificent scenery she found time for painting landscapes-taking her equipment along on hiking and climbing outings.

The ceramics are also undergoing a transformation with more focus on form, figurative and abstract, reaching beyond clay.

Marea says"my work is a response to the elemental nature of my surroundings, a story I retell in color and with objects which I hope have the power to trigger our memory of things buried below the surface of our everyday minds."