Molly Hatch, Aspire: After Meissen, USA, 2015

Aspire is Molly Hatch’s plate painting made by sourcing the iconic Meissen Porcelain Manufacturer’s Purple Indian tableware pattern. Aspire is the second in an ongoing series of works by Hatch that explores the relationship between the historic and the contemporary through the deconstruction of a traditional tableware pattern. Hatch re-contextualizes the historic surface pattern on her large-scale 6ft by 6ft ceramic surface by hand-painting the pattern on a group of 58 hand-thrown and decorated porcelain plates.This shift up in scale, combined with the cropping of the original pattern renders each individual plate both an abstraction and highlight of the original pattern—creating a new experience of the familiar.

Hatch’s work has been widely collected, commissioned, and exhibited at art fairs nationally and internationally. In 2013, Hatch had a solo museum exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and was included in New Blue and White, a contemporary decorative arts exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In the spring of 2014 Physic Garden, a monumental 456-plate painting, was installed at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and in 2015 Chronicle Books of San Francisco published a book of her work. In 2016, the Clayarch Gimhae Museum in Korea exhibited a selection of wall installations by the artist. As the artist works on a commission basis, custom works can be created through Todd Merrill Studio.