Hilary Barta (1944- ) was born in Roxborough, New Zealand. She trained as a teacher in the early 1970s, specialising in ceramics. As a student, she spent a year in England, working with potters like Elizabeth Fritsch and Jacqueline Poncelet and this led to an interest in slipcast bone china with trailed and inlaid decoration. She explored mould-making techniques when studying ceramics at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and at that time also became interested in art history. In 1979, she worked in Sussex, UK, with a fellow slipcaster, Sally Holland, and also admired the handbuilt and marble-decorated shapes of Brighton potter James Tower. Back in Melbourne during the 1980s, she exhibited her work at the Meat Market Craft Centre and Distelfink Gallery. In the early 1990s, she moved on to larger coil-built stoneware forms inspired by seeing the Goulandris collection of Cycladic Art in 1991 in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Her work is signed with a painted 'Barta'.
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