Jo went to art school in Otago and majored in photography and dabbled in printmaking and ceramics.

After that Jo decided that her dream was to be a filmmaker and so carried on with the old tertiary education, went to Victoria University and studied film and drama. During this time she managed to get into a number of the design courses at the Wellington Design School, stage and theatre design becoming her passion.

While studying, the Dowse Art Museum employed Jo part time to run all their student art programmes. Jo taught for a couple of years then left that to work as a photographic technician at the school of Architecture. Jo had an amazing mentor, who taught her more in the year she worked for him than she ever did in any of the other institutions. He taught me about light and he taught me about people. Sadly Gavin died while pursuing his dream of making a film about black robins.

Around about this time Jo started to have enough of photographic chemicals and looked around for something else. Jo was doing a theatre project that involved medieval designs and she needed to make a clay carving. Jo had dabbled in clay while at art school but never really gave it much thought. One thing led to another and before she knew it she was employing two people to help me make tiles while she worked part time on these, part time painting and part time as a filmmaker.

Her concerns as an artist and filmmaker have to do with, human rights and the environment. As a designer, her ceramics deal largely with the environment.

Her next series of work will be dealing with indigenous species of this country, as well as telling a few stories about introduced species...