Award-winning artist Joy Perkins is half way through her part-time art degree at Banbury College of Art. Although she was awarded the high accolade of the Mary Moser award in Oxford Artweeks 2004, Joy drives up to Banbury every Thursday and Friday, working for her degree.

"I'll be 81 by the time I get it," she tells me, laughing. Joy really is a joy to spend time with. Her energy and enthusiasm is enough to put the rest of us to shame, and a laugh is never very far from her lips.

Her natural ability to create vibrant, colourful works of art has always been with her, she remembers her fascination with weave and colour as a young girl, but sadly her strengths were ignored and discouraged by the school system of her day.

Today, Joy would be diagnosed as dyslexic, but back when she was a girl there was no help for people like her. Her memories of school are not good. But she is putting all that behind her now, and has been accumulating courses and qualifications pretty steadily for the past 30 or so years.

In her 40's she attended a sandwich course in Loughborough, which gave her a teaching certificate to teach adults creative embroidery and design. When she moved to Oxford, she tried various creative short courses run by the WEA.

"The creative writing course frightened me half to death," she remembers.

It was art that was always her real passion, and it was art that continued to draw her time and attention. Courses at Ruskin College in Walton Street led to Joy's involvement in the Age Well' campaign, investigating and improving public resources within Oxford for older people.

Age Well looked at what was on offer as far as access to galleries, university facilities and public buildings was concerned, and set about raising awareness of the needs of the older section of the community.

It was through this and Joy's work with groups of older people in day centres and residential homes, that she was contacted by Barry Reeves, organiser of last year's Re:Invent' exhibition at the Ovada Gallery in Gloucester Green. Barry had himself graduated from art college post-retirement, and gathered together a group of 20 mature artists for an exhibition, providing a platform for their work.

The variety of the work in the Re:Invent exhibition was enough to gag anyone who might want to suggest that maturer artists aren't as inventive as their younger colleagues. There was a high standard of work covering a wide breadth of mediums, such as painting, textile, video, performance and print-making.

Although Joy worked as a hairdresser for over thirty years, running her salon in Eynsham, she never lost her love for textiles, colour and design. Talking about her second career as an artist, she said: "I've become an artist. I didn't think I was one, but I am."

Scarred by her experiences at school, she has slowly built up her confidence and self-esteem, taking a compliment here, a positive criticism there, and finally building enough courage to head off to art school.

She has a studio at the back of her house, as well as another room behind the garage for larger pieces of work. Although she still does most of her work at home, where she finds she can relax and concentrate better, Joy gains a lot of support from her tutors at college.

"When I have what I call my weeping and wailing, I just have to say Help!' and they come and sort me out. I've learnt so much from seeing the other artists and their work, having to write essays and use a computer."

At Banbury, all the artists are mixed up together, the young with the old, the part and full-timers, so everyone is working together all the time, rather than being kept in small groups. This is a very inspiring way to work, and looking at the beautiful pictures and textiles that Joy has produced for her summer exam, it is easy to see that her work has really been inspired by her time at College.

When she was awarded the Mary Moser Award in 2004, (the award is for an artist who has come to art later in life as a second career,) she was only one year in to her course, and was still working mainly with textiles. Now, although textiles are still incorporated into the work, there is more printing on textiles and large-scale painting.

Sadly, not all of her prints and textiles will be in the West Oxford Community Centre during Artweeks, as many will be under the beedy eye of the examiners that week. The WOCC have taken the neighbouring allotments as their theme for Artweeks 2006 and Joy has been producing photographs, printed textiles and paintings based on the vegetation in the allotments.

She and her colleagues at Banbury will be taking part in a three month exhibition at Templeton College in Kennington, from July. There will be plenty of room for her larger works of river scenes and huge heads of ornamental artichokes and thistles.

Joy is bursting with ideas and is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who is foolish enough to feel that life needs to quieten down a bit as you get older.