Lilach Mileikowski is a ceramic artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from Israel with a background in graphic design, Lilach migrated to Melbourne in 1995, completed a Diploma of Arts-Ceramics, and established her ceramics studio. This was followed by an Advanced Diploma of Creative Product Development. In 2016, she completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University, her research focusing on the spiritual and political concerns of identity, exploring the dual notions of fragility and strength.

Informed by her cultural background, Lilach’s practice presents ideas of personal and global significance. Through the manipulation of the form, she challenges the limitations of the medium and its fusion with multifaceted materials. Her work functions at many levels as the poetics of the past are brought into the present to question the future.

Inspired by ancient vessels and artefacts, Lilach’s ceramics are characterised by a deep appreciation of archetypal forms. Cultural identity and the formation of identity are recurrent themes in her art, along with the binary elements of fragility and strength. Her works fuse the ancient with the contemporary. The vessel, representing sustenance, as it enables us to carry food and water, also becomes a carrier of her own family’s history of migration and cultural integration. Delicate parchments inscribed with sacred Hebrew prayers for protection are wrapped around surfaces, and excerpts from precious family letters and recipes are pressed into crevices and voids.

As in nature, Lilach’s forms are repeated. She joins multiples to create one whole, where each component exists to balance the other, resulting in a work that is simultaneously precarious and resilient. A metaphor for the migrant experience.

Lilach’s work is held in private collections in Australia and internationally. She has been included in prestigious exhibitions such as the International Ceramics Festival, Mino, Japan; the Gold Coast International Ceramic Art Award, QLD; the Victorian Ceramic Art Award, Victoria; the Muswellbrook Art Prize, NSW; Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, NSW; and the Lake Macquarie Art Prize, NSW.

At the conclusion of 2023, her work was celebrated in a solo show, Sustenance, Glen Eira Council Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria.

Most recently she was selected as a finalist for the Australian Ceramics Association Exhibition Held, NSW; the Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition, Victoria; and the 2024 North Queensland Ceramic Awards, Townsville, QLD.

Invited by the Interior Designer Simone Haag, Lilach will be participating in the Craft Victoria end-of-year show, Fables & Folklore. November 2024 – January 2025.