Sue Daly was born in 1945 in
Devonport, Auckland. She graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts from
Auckland University in 1966 and completed a Diploma of Teaching in
1967.
Daly has been exhibiting her work
throughout New Zealand since 1964 in both solo and group shows. A
committed educator in the field of arts, Daly has held a number of
high profile positions. For many years she was the Head of
Department in Art at several high schools in the Auckland and
Northland areas, before taking up the position of Senior Lecturer
in Painting at the Auckland School of Art and later at the Auckland
Institute of Technology. Daly continues to work as a Programme
Leader for art courses in colleges and art schools, most
prominently for the NorthTec
Hokianga campus, where her work and
her experience in education has had a formative influence on an
emerging generation of Northland artists.
Her current work acknowledges Daly's
physical and spiritual environment, amalgamating mud and clay
collected from the forests and harbour floor of the Hokianga with
paint, pencil, pen, varnish and gold leaf to form works of great
density and depth, across which repetitive marks are strewn to
suggest the social interplay of modern New Zealand. As Daly
explains, these marks are "seemingly identical but always
different, veiling the surfaces, revealing and hiding the
underlying ground. This meditative covering soothes and
disguises the turmoil below."