Born in Rotorua, New Zealand, she was the eldest of six children and grew up on the Bombay Hills. In the early 1980s, she led a peripatetic life, traveling to Australia and around New Zealand. She moved to Christchurch in the late 1980s and, without any significant formal training, "devoted herself to her art practice". She held her first exhibition of photographs and drawings in Wellington in 1981, and her first painting exhibition at the Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery in 1989. In 1993, along with others such as the musician Peter Stapleton, she relocated to Dunedin where she participated in the city's "‘free noise’ scene", and was instrumental in establishing the Metonymic record label (1996) and the experimental film and music festival Lines of Flight (2000). She took up residence in her current studio near the Dunedin waterfront in 2007, which initiated "an especially concentrated period of painting".
