Mal Bouzaid has a long and passionate association with the sea and has spent most of her life on or beside it. She grew up on Auckland’s Northshore, at Takapuna and has spent many years sailing the Hauraki Gulf. For the past 15 years she has lived at Port Fitzroy on Great Barrier Island.

In 2000, Mal returned to Whitecliffe College of art and completed a MFA. Her post graduate study gave her the confidence to shed some of the more figurative elements in loosely impressionist style and simplify her painting into sophisticated and contemplative abstract compositions that, in their subtlety, remain redolent with salty air.