Following the dissolution of her marriage to Schuyler Livingston Parsons in 1923, Parsons studied painting and sculpture in Paris at Antoine Bourdelle’s Academie de la Grande Chaumière, learning alongside Alberto Giacometti.
Though she turned away from sculpture after her brief time as an expatriate, Parsons would return to it in 1966, fashioning polychrome assemblages. Made of weathered wood washed ashore by the sea and painted, Parsons’s sculptures combine the simplicity of folk art with a worldly sensibility steeped in modernism. At her studio in Southold, Long Island, Parsons walked the beach looking for what she described as “carpenter’s throwaways.” Scavenging flotsam, found bits of wood, she explained she looked for “… pieces of houses or docks or boats or signs. … They tossed about in the sea for I don’t know how long. And then they wash ashore, broken and changed, and I find them.” Drawn to the derelict, Parsons painted and assembled her sculptures in an intuitive process, allowing her materials to ultimately inform the work’s final form.