BIOGRAPHY

Hilary Bird Mayo is a London based artist specialising in hand built sculptural ceramics.

A professional member of the Crafts Potter Association and Contemporary Applied Arts; and alumni of the Crafts Council Hothouse programme.  

Making for over 40 years, Hilary trained on the renowned City Lit Diploma course, beginning her professional ceramics career in 2012. She has an honours degree in the History of Design from MMU and her first career was at the BBC producing programmes.

Known for hand-built stoneware vessels with a focus on surface decoration, in 2024 she took time out to explore ideas that had been percolating for a long time. New sculptural work is the result of ongoing experimentation with materials and approaches to making. While themes of fragility and resilience remain a constant.

Current work 

. . . explores the liminal space where decaying structures and resurgent nature intersect, reflecting an interest in ideas around hidden narratives and transformation.

Orford Ness, a remote desert-like shingle spit on the fast eroding Suffolk Coast provides the inspiration. A long abandoned top secret MoD base used for experiments and bomb testing, it is now a place of wildness, nature conservation, and a sanctuary for birdlife.

Dotted with decaying concrete and rusted corrugated iron buildings, the landscape is a strange mix of beauty and desolation.

Derelict structures recolonised by nature, bear silent witness to many hidden human stories.

Work seeks to capture the transient, fragile quality of this Jarman-esque wasteland.

MAKING

Hand built forms are constructed with stoneware clays. Texture and surface echo rusted, eroded, lichen covered structures, crumbling concrete and bricks. This contrasts with the purity of porcelain and bone china, used to create nest like sculptures, eggshell forms, and fragments from the natural world.

Each sculpture is an assemblage of elements finalised once firing is complete. Sometimes work is juxtaposed with found objects, collected on the Suffolk Coast.

Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu