Since Jim's departure, I've been re-reading his extraordinary collection of interviews The Skin of Years, which my partner Pauline and I received as a gift shortly after it was published in 2014.
In 2015 Ian Cooke, PhD art researcher, asked me the following question: ‘What was my knowledge of minimalist and conceptual art like in New Zealand in the early 1970s?’ In response, I acknowledged Jim as a key arbiter of this knowledge through his 1968 travels in the USA as well as his networking with Kiwi expats, other artists, curators and critics, which is referred to in several chapters of . Jim's teaching philosophy was focused upon student-centred learning, where students become not only their own researchers and producers of art, but also their own primary critics. For Jim, a useful learning process was context dependent and the result of engaged learning. He believed that students
