[3] Early in her career Pick was grouped with other Ilam graduates, such as Tony de Lautour, Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson, Saskia Leek and Bill Hammond under the title of the Pencilcase Painters, known for a painting style that evoked the doodlings of bored teenagers.

Works from this period have been described as 'dreamscapes' in which symbolic images from Pick's memory (beds, dresses, pincushions, colanders) float surreally across rich surfaces.

These strangely dislocated objects were often domestic in nature, indicating the special significance memory can inject into otherwise everyday objects.Shortly after making those works, Pick travelled to Europe, where she found she was again overwhelmed by the immense history of European art.

When she returned to New Zealand, she began painting in a very different way, using figures and objects sculpted in the round with greens, blues, warm pinks and browns to explore a new-found sensuality and flesh out a gentle, often naive eroticism.

[6] In 1997–1998 Pick lectured in painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts[3] In 1999 she was awarded the University of Otago's Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and on completing the residency remained in Dunedin until 2007.

[7] He continued: If other contemporary artists unconsciously stay clear of the depiction of women for the fact that its overexploited, it leaves it to Pick to breed together imagery from fashion and art history in a hothouse, dreamily upsetting mythologies still inherent in our treatment of the female figure.

[8] Reviewer James Dignan, writing of Tell Me More in the Otago Daily Times in 2010, described the development of Pick's work as moving [...] from ghostlike scratches on canvas to full-blooded figurative darkness [showing influences] from Bosch through Redon to Leonor Fini.

[9]In 2012 Pick produced paintings that were used as the basis for the opening credits for New Zealand director Jane Campion's BBC television series Top of the Lake.