Therese Oulton studied in London at St Martin's School of Art (1975–9) and at the Royal College of Art (1980–83), where she completed her MFA. In 1987, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. She has shown in over 45 group shows since 1982. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and Tate Gallery in London.She lives and works in London.

Her paintings are densely worked and evoke the landscape. Cardinal (1984) and Mortal Coil (1984) are sombre depictions of crevices and mountains. Using thick paint and evoking a darkly sensuous mood, the pictures also suggest bodily features and surfaces. Much like the art of Frank Auerbach or Leon Kossof, her work shares with Neo-Expressionism a sense of the mythic and symbolic while escaping the empty rhetoric of that movement; she went on to employ a delicate and virtuoso painting technique that suggests a considered, contemplative practice. Bedrock (1990) takes the surface texture of rock as the starting point for a visual field that suggests the coalescing of one form into another. Such illusions are the result of her procedure, by which the surface of the painting is gradually covered from one edge to the other.

Oulton went on to create complicated palindromic forms as in Trista I (1998). Her interest in repeated forms was extended in paintings that allude to strips of film negatives: Still and Slow Motion (both 1999) are typical in repeating four delicately rendered forms against a neutral background.