I have been into drawing and painting as far back as I can remember. As the eldest of six siblings growing up in Dunedin, New Zealand, we were encouraged in our art endeavours as usually birthday presents were boxes of paint my father had bought up in bulk from art supply shop  sales.

My other big childhood interest was music and this was encouraged in our family too. My father, a pathologist also  loved to paint in oils or sing in operas put on by the Dunedin Opera Company.

When I left school I considered pursuing an art training, but for some reason in the end opted for a B.A. at University of Otago where I majored in subjects completely new to me, like  Anthropology/ Archaeology and Psychology.

I ended up teaching at primary schools and later young people with physical disabilities for many years and I especially loved giving the children plenty of art opportunities, something many other teachers seemed quite scared of. I tried to give my own three children the opportunity to discover their creativity too.

I enrolled for the occasional art class in Invercargill where I was then living, but it wasn’t until the early nineties in Christchurch, when I went on an experimental drawing course that the spark really ignited again. After a year of night class at Hagley College I was accepted into the BFA programme at Ilam School of Fine Arts at University of Canterbury. 

I spent six years at Ilam progressing through the undergraduate degree and then post-graduate ones and from where  I graduated with a MFA in painting (Distinction) in 2001.

A busy period of exhibiting in both solo and group exhibitions followed. In later years there had been a bit of a hiatus with my art practice especially after some family concerns and the Christchurch earthquakes. Now I feel re-energized and eager to move into a strong creative space and to discover more honestly my identity through drawing and paint. I can now see how many of the influences in my earlier life are, to me at least, identifiable in my paintings – the music, microscopic and cellular images and dendritic forms and the multi layering and excavation of the surfaces of my paintings. I’m really looking forward to following these leads in future series of work.​