During her childhood, Hildawati Soemantri spent a couple of years in Amsterdam when her accountant father was transferred there. In 1964 she began her ceramics studies at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB, Art Institute in Bandung) a year after the programme was opened. Lecturers Eddy Kartasubarna and Angkama Setijadi, two painters who had been trained in the art of ceramics in the United States, as well as Rita Widagdo (b. 1938), who introduced the ideas of the Bauhaus school to ITB, influenced H. Soemantri’s early works.

H. Soemantri finished her studies at ITB in 1971. Two years later, she received a one-year Fullbright scholarship and started a Master of Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute, New York. After receiving her master’s degree she visited different ceramic workshops, notably in Japan, to extend her practice. Upon returning to Jakarta, she started her lifelong commitment as a ceramic lecturer at the Jakarta Institute of Fine Arts (IKJ), setting up a ceramic studio which opened in 1984. She dedicated her energy and knowledge not only to teaching and creating ceramics, but also to her academic career.

From 1992 until 1995, H. Soemantri wrote her PhD thesis at Cornell University in New York, becoming the first Indonesian woman to earn a PhD in art history. Her research centred around the terracotta artefacts from the Majapahit sites located in different regions of Indonesia. Her knowledge of this terracotta heritage affected her understanding and teaching of ceramics. She incorporated the philosophy and spirituality of the traditional terracotta craft from the Majapahit era into her own artistic practice, through which she observed everyday objects entering into a dialogue with the materiality of clay.

In her first solo exhibition The Face of Life (1976), she intentionally presented her objects without titles, so the visitors could experience the objects purely emotionally and without prejudice. She displayed ivory-coloured abstract objects and twelve broken bowls as an installation to take up the theme of fragility and discontinuity in life. With this ground-breaking exhibition, H. Soemantri became a pioneer of contemporary ceramics art in Indonesia, paving the way for a new generation of abstract and conceptual ceramist artists. The inspiration for her series Gunungan [Cosmic Mountain, 1998], resembling minimalist mountains composed with different flat ceramics in sombre hues, came from her fascination with the mountains near the University of Victoria in Canada, where she taught in the 1990s. Mountains were also important to her in a symbolic sense because in Javanese belief they are the home of gods and ancestors. The Gunungan series was characteristic of H. Soemantri’s second creative phase, where she entangled spiritual symbolism with the highly skilled handling of composition, form, arrangement, colour, fragments and cracks, demonstrating greater complexity and narration than her earlier works.

The National Gallery of Indonesia holds some of her artworks, while other pieces such as Untitled (1978) were replicated by Purnomo Clay (b. 1982) for the Biennale Jogja Equator in 2019.