As Principal Conservator at Auckland Art Gallery, Hillary can spend days surveying the surfaces of paintings under a microscope.

She began to practise as an artist herself holding her first exhibition in 2003. 

An interest in painting on a small, sometimes even miniature, scale is understandable if unavoidable. The actual supports she chooses to paint on are however somewhat surprising; pipi shells, wooden buttons, pocket size panels and postal scale pieces of watercolour paper (made for people who like to paint their own postcards while on holiday).

What Hillary paints is associated with her profession at the forensic frontier of art history. The supports she paints on relate to a world of amateur enthusiasm, holidays, and painting for pleasure.

In Lucky, her most recent exhibition at Anna Miles Gallery, Hillary looks to a series of New Zealand still life paintings of the 1928 – 1942.