ARTIST STATEMENT

Hilary Diane is a New Orleans assemblage artist whose sculptural mixed media works explore themes of memory, devotion, transformation, ornament, and emotional preservation.

Drawn to New Orleans as a teenager, she experienced the city less as a destination and more as a recognition of a place where beauty, decay, ritual, romance, spirituality, excess, grief, and celebration coexist and unapologetically. She knew early on that she would never truly belong anywhere else.

Working from her studio in the Marigny neighborhood, Hilary Diane creates original assemblage pieces using reclaimed frames, architectural fragments, vintage objects, resin, paint, religious iconography, florals, found materials, and hand-built sculptural elements.

Hearts, portals, reliquaries, wings, and miniature altars recur throughout Hilary Diane’s work as symbols of protection, transformation, femininity, and emotional preservation. These recurring forms create intimate symbolic worlds that exist somewhere between shrine, artifact, memory object, and imagined mythology.

A major turning point in her life profoundly altered her understanding of time, freedom, and creative purpose, ultimately leading her toward a more uncompromising artistic practice rooted in intuition and emotional authenticity.

Rather than treating devotion and humor as opposites, Hilary Diane allows both to occupy the same visual space. Small interruptions of wit, theatricality, and understated absurdity soften the work’s darker romanticism and create a more intimate relationship with the viewer.

Outside the studio, Hilary’s creative practice extends into the spaces she inhabits, restoring, collecting, rearranging, and building layered interiors that mirror the same sense of atmosphere, intimacy, and emotional storytelling found throughout her work.

“Beauty survives in fragments.”