Molly Hatch, Attune, USA, 2024

Molly Hatch’s ceramic wall installations may best represent the “grey space” between fine art, contemporary design, and craft that has become de rigueur for museum collections and modern collectors. Using ceramic surfaces as both her canvas and subject matter, she appropriates and re-contextualizes historic pattern and imagery across compositions of hand-painted earthenware plates, the glazed surfaces of the plates collectively become a fragmented canvas for her delicate, painterly re-renderings.

Attune was inspired by a pre-existing work titled Amalgam which was specifically crafted for the Sarasota Art Museum. Amalgam spans two of the museum’s floors and comprises 450 hand-painted earthenware plates in white, blue and gold luster. In an effort to rework Amalgam for a private residence, Hatch created Attune, which is composed of 107 earthenware plates and measures 8′ H by 6’5″ wide.

The patterns and motifs deployed in Hatch’s plates in Amalgam and Attune are drawn from historical ceramics, such as 15th-century Chinese Ming-dynasty Hanap drinking vessels, 19th-century Moroccan Fassi (from Fez) ware, 17th- and 18th-century Dutch Delft vases, 18th-century Mexican Talavera tile panels, and 19th- and 20th-century Japanese-inspired English ceramics designed by Christopher Dresser. By creating a cross-cultural bricolage of blue-and-white motifs ubiquitous in these ceramic wares, Hatch brings to the fore material and visual evidence of centuries-old global trade networks and the resultant shared aesthetics that connect us. As seen in Amalgam, Hatch’s research-based, critical practice contributes to a genre of fine art ceramics with as rigorous a practice as painting or sculpture.

Though the components of her works are, in effect, technically functional, they are ultimately not intended for use, but installed to be observed and studied. A set of formal and fine dinnerware is an anomaly to younger generations, having little or no importance to the relaxed and multicultural way that we now live our daily lives. What many museums hold in their archives can be hard for the public to appreciate.

Hatch has in effect “reset the table,” by breaking the patterns of tradition and skewing the dinner services of old. She transforms and deconstructs what was once everyday and craft-based, helping us look at formality, history, and class through a contemporary perspective. Her process involves enlarging familiar patterns and motifs from traditional ceramics, textiles, fine art painting, and illustration, digitally igniting them in color, scale, and composition to create a new hybrid pattern. The precise balance of old and new opens a space to acknowledge our evolution in the 21st century in relation to aesthetics and ritual.



Earthenware Plates with Underglaze, Glaze and 22K Gold Luster

96h x 76w x 1.50d in
243.84h x 193.04w x 3.81d cm