Dunedin artist Jim Cooper has an MFA in ceramics, he lectures at Otago Polytech and was the 2006 joint prize winner of the prestigious Norsewear awards. "Jim Cooper was born in 1955 and grew up in the rugged West Coast of the South Island. In the 1980s he was one of the artists who made a shift away from the prevailing tradition based on Japanese aesthetics.

The movement was to sculptural 3 dimensional qualities inherent in ceramic form. The ways Jim explores a concept and pushes clay to its absolute limits also adhere to and confirm his fine art intent. If he were to peel the glazes off the sculptures, lay it out flat and hang it on the wall ot would be up there with the best abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning." Taken from Sgt P catalogue essay by Brian Wood