“I’m definitely a New Englander. [But] I’ve lived all over the world,’’ said the ceramic artist, who attended Rhode Island School of Design and then earned a master’s degree at Alfred College of Ceramics, known in the art world as “the Harvard of ceramics.’’
Her Hingham years were “pretty formative,’’ Hill said, recalling the childhood pleasures of “raking leaves in the fall and roasting potatoes in the burning piles of leaves. Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood behind Liberty Pole Road… . Walking down to Marchetti’s Market for Cokes and penny candy. Skating at Cushing Pond in the winters.’’
She also remembers “the unstructured time’’ of a baby boom childhood in residential Hingham amid “packs of kids’’ who “ruled the neighborhood.’’
“I used to take long walks behind my house in the woods, going by old Colonial stone foundations,’’ Hill said last week. She found vines of Concord grapes growing in the wild and made grape jelly as presents.
Drawing the landscape helped her get her start in ceramics. “It started out as illustration - I like drawing - drawing landscapes on vessels, boxes, or rounded forms. Landscape has always been a theme,’’ Hill said. “As I’ve gone on, they’ve gotten more and more abstract.’’
Her recent work responds to the landscape she found on visits to the American Southwest. She’s exhibiting her “Southwest series’’ of saggar-fired vessels (a technique using boxlike containers to protect ware during firing) made with twisted branches for handles, in the South Street Gallery show.
