Anne Emmanuelle Marpeau, a french artist, creates shadow box dioramas of Maine's coastal history. Marpeau continues the sailor's artistic tradition, describing her boxes as « ex-voto », a reference to folk art as a spiritual offering for safe passage across the ocean, because the way of the sea was hazardous, and still is.Her scenes show the heritage and history of eastern seaboard towns and seafarers, boatbuilders, fishermen, lighthouse keepers, lifesaving crews... She lived for 25 years in an old boatyard on France's breton coast, before moving even more closely to the sea. Marpeau spent much of her childhood with a taciturn grandfather who made his living as a fisherman. Before he had to have a wooden leg, he was a member of the life saving crew.When she first started making her shadow boxes, she said she imagined she was telling the stories he would have told her had he been talkative. These stories which started on the French coast, and the medium of the shadowbox are also part of the Maine vernacular. (The Maine maritime museum in Bath and the Penobscot Marine museum's collection in Searsport includes dozens of New England made dioramas dating back a century or more) A. Emmanuelle Marpeau has received several awards from the Mystic Seaport Museum including an Award of Excellence, and the Thomas Hoyne Award, given to the work that best documents an aspect of the marine industry of today or yesterday.