BIOGRAPHY

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

She is a professional member of the Crafts Potter Association and Contemporary Applied Arts; and an 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 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 new ideas, materials and approaches to making. While themes of fragility, resilience and place remain a constant. 

CURRENT WORK
New work seeks to capture the transient quality of Orford Ness, a remote desert-like shingle spit on the fast eroding Suffolk Coast. A one time top secret MoD base used for experiments and bomb testing. Long abandoned, it is now a place of wildness, nature conservation and a sanctuary for birdlife.

This Jarman-esque wasteland, dotted with decaying concrete and rusting corrugated iron buildings, is a strange mix of beauty and desolation. These derelict structures, that bear silent witness to many human stories, are being slowly recolonised by nature.

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.

Conscious of sustainability Hilary is currently experimenting with raw glazed, once fired work.