For almost thirty years, the ceramic artist Hilda Merom has been producing functional ware and sculptural pieces using a variety of firing techniques. It is the creative and unusual art of saggar firing which holds the greatest fascination for her. Lately she also especially enjoys her “stone series” and her “saggar rock” work a combination of craggy, textured surfaces with very smooth ones. Through this process she feels her ideas about clay work art and life are brought to the fore.

Years of an on going relationship with movement and music, a meditation and Qigong practice, my encounters with different cultures as well as my own, my relationships, and of course my on going learning and experimentation with clay have all culminated into my present work.

During the last years I have been very much taken by the Saggar firing technique derived from the ancient Chinese firing method. As the colors and rough texture naturally grow out of the clay with the help of the organic materials which come from all around me, I feel I am engaging in a dialogue with the clay, a dialogue through which I shape the material but it also shapes me. It takes stillness in order to let this dialogue take place.

Although I have spent many years experimenting with different organic materials: seeds, fruit peels, dry sea weed, egg and sea shells, olives chaff, and many more, and have organized written data on the results, it is not the control over the material that fascinate me, but the element of the unknown. It is though the unknown that I connect to the mystery, to a place of awe and curiosity. This too, like the experience of stillness is a deep well of inspiration for me; it is the place from which I drink and thirst to keep evolving within myself and within my art.

The rock formations in my latest work hold the elements mentioned above. They are a product of deep listening to the material in order to hear what it is asking of me – in stillness I rest in the vastness of the unknown. The vastness forms itself through my hands into those rocks which combine nature and human, open and closed, being and holding, rough and smooth, presence and disappearance”.