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As a group, they had an exhibition of prints at the Ayala Museum in 1996 and several mixed-media exhibitions in Museo Iloilo, the Visayas Art Gallery in UP Visayas and the Holiday Inn in Manila. They also formed the core group of participating artists and facilitators of the Hublag! The Ilonggo Arts Festival, a project of the Arts Council of Iloilo Foundation Inc., held from 1988 to 1995. For this exhibit, they tapped the resources of the community potters, as those in barangay Hibao-an in Mandurriao.

A number of the seven exhibiting artists already had previous experience in working with terra cotta. Others shifted or branched out to this medium in order to expand their creative range and enrich their experience of art without abandoning their earlier media.

One of them, Benjie Belgica, has been working in clay sculpture for some years now. He began as a painter but later shifted to creating terra-cotta sculptures. In fact, he has exhibited his clay works in the United States and Canada. His works consist of compact human figures, their heads upraised with mouths open and in the act of singing. They have an air of great concentration, the details of costume minimal and the textures smooth in order to achieve a unified effect.

It is Cabalfin who has the longest experience in studio pottery, having apprenticed to the well-known potter Nelfa Querubin in her beautiful studio and worksite at Miag-ao by the sea, though she is now based in the United States. Cabalfin eventually built his own pottery studio in Leon, Iloilo. Dedicated to terra cotta, he trained in a ceramic workshop in Japan and has had several individual pottery exhibitions.

For this exhibit, Cabalfin was inspired by the shape of seashells. His table sculptures consist of large shells of different kinds, remarkable for their sensistive modeling, with the clay evenly thinned out

into mellifluous shapes. To these finely articulated forms, the artist incorporates faces and figures of sleeping women, softly embossed on the curving surfaces, not intrusive but harmonious, allusive of nature spirits or elusive nymphs.

Although the other artists may not have worked with terra cotta before, most of them have done related work in sculpture, in wood or other media. For instance, before working with terra cotta, Amora did sculptures in wood and stone as well as paintings ( he was a semifinalist in the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards). Of the seven artists, it is he who does genre works related to farm activities, such as planting rice and catching fish. His table sculptures are compact in composition and marked by fluidity of form, while retaining a rustic quality in their textures. He depicts what is most familiar to him, his immediate rural environment in Rumagayray, San Enrique, Iloilo.

Orig, who honed his figurative skills in painting mural-sized movie billboards, shows confidence in handling human figures in terra cotta. In one piece, Adam and Eve, the figures are integrated into an open-work design of climbing vines and forest growths that create a rich three-dimensional form. Other works consist of strongly molded human torsos sprouting colorful plant forms at the neck and body junctures, while another work are shirts of clay hugging the human figure and revealing its topography even more sharply than nudes.

Tan, on the other hand, draws his figures from folk subjects in ahumurous approach using bamboo and found objects, while Zoluaga, one of the winners of the 1998 Philip Morris Awards, goes surrealist in his rows of feet with winged eyes marching to a godlike computer bearing the dollar sign, while others move away from it.