Molly Hatch. Making Place Matter

MOLLY HATCH Making Place Matter

Copyright © 2022 Todd Merrill Copyright © 2022 Elizabeth Essner: Excerpt from “In Place” in Making Place Matter: Cultural Identity, Community, and Clay.

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MOLLY HATCH Works from Making Place Matter

Introducing new work by Molly Hatch, Ibrahim Said, and Kukuli Velarde, Making Place Matter is the inaugural exhibition in The Clay Studio’s newly built home in the South Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.

Co-curated by Jennifer Zwilling and Elizabeth Essner, the exhibition is on view at The Clay Studio at 1425 N. American Street from April 23rd to October 2nd, 2022.

Published by Todd Merrill Studio New York, NY

LINEA Elizabeth Essner, 2022 Molly Hatch’s early memories of objects fuel her artistic practice as an adult. As such, Hatch takes works from the past—often domestic decorative arts—as her primary source. These “precious witnesses to our stories,”as she has called them, serve as source material for her monumental ceramic installations. 1 Ceramic plates are both givers and keepers of cultural memory, the nexus of Hatch’s exploration in her body of work for Making Place Matter at The Clay Studio. The artist began the project, as she often does, with museum sources. Drawn to Chinese export porcelain plates from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hatch selected the famed 1796 plate from the presidential dinner service for Martha Washington.2 Commissioned by a Dutch trader and produced in China to christen the newly born nation of the United States, it aptly demonstrates how a seemingly simple plate can symbolically and literally put it all on the table. The linked chain of fifteen states underscores the notion of national unity. A luxe golden sunburst inset with the First Lady’s monogram floats above the Latin motto meaning “our union is our glory and our defense against him.” Hatch was particularly attentive to the plate’s subtle blue rim depicting a serpent eating its tail. Known as an ouroboros, this is an ancient symbol for the intrinsic connection between life, death, and rebirth.

Ouroboros, USA, 2021 Hand-painted earthenware, underglaze, glaze, gold luster 70h x 70w x 1.50d in / 177.80h x 177.80w x 3.81d cm Commissioned for Making Place Matter at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia

In Hatch’s response, the artist shifts this image of transformation from the edge of the original to put Ouroboros squarely in the center.

Illustrating the close ties between destruction and creation, blue and white snakeskin explodes across the surface of plates. The golden starburst radiates outwards, an echo of Washington’s golden star.

Its luster becomes a mirror, a way for Hatch to signify that “we are still rethinking ourselves, rebirthing ourselves in that eternal cycle of recreating America.”³ (Above) Plate 1796, Porcelain with underglaze blue, enamel, and gilt decoration, Gift of the McNeil Americana Collection, 2006. Philadelphia Museum of Art (2006-3-7).

Likewise, Philadelphia Waterworks is directly inspired by a circa 1825 blue and white plate illustrating the first municipal waterworks in the country. As Hatch enlarges and abstracts the original imagery, its details are transformed, shifting their meaning. Some are amplified, while others disappear. Interspersed plates of lustered gold insert the viewer into the historical landscape, a portal to reflect the Philadelphia of today.

(Above) Plate, showing the Philadelphia Waterworks, c. 1820-1830, Artist/maker unknown, Chinese, for export to the American market, Hard-paste porcelain with underglaze enamel and gilt decoration. Purchased with funds contributed by the William B. Dietrich Foundation, 1992, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1992-133-1).

(Right) Philadelphia Waterworks, USA, 2021 Hand-thrown, hand-painted porcelain plates, underglaze, glaze, gold luster 65h x 72w x 2.50d in / 165.10h x 182.88w x 6.35d cm Commissioned for Making Place Matter at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia

The artist often refers to her grandmother’s house where, in her youth, Hatch was surrounded by eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European ceramics—some of which were brought as ballast from her American ancestor’s merchant ships. Fascinated, Hatch found their formality disconnected from her vastly different life growing up on a Vermont dairy farm. This tension between her rural upbringing and the distant ties of these inherited objects has, in turn, granted the artist both an insider’s and outsider’s view of the historical works with which she engages. As a result, her work simultaneously examines and abstracts historical patterns.

Lineages—both national and personal—are reflected in the final two related works: Linea and Linea Stack, named to “honor the idea of inheritance,” the artist explains. Hatch was born into a long line of women artists. Her grandmother was a painter, and her mother was a farmer by trade who has maintained a painting practice. An eighteenth-century French textile fragment from the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum was selected for its resonance with those found in the faded grandeur of her grandmother’s home. In Linea, Hatch imposes a grid onto the silk fabric pattern’s wandering flowers.

Lifted away from the wall onto pillbox forms, they are forced into circular clarity. Blank plates in the composition reinforce the pattern’s absence, perhaps akin to a family member whose physical presence is long gone but still felt.

Linea, USA, 2021 Slip cast, altered, hand-painted porcelain, underglaze, glaze 40h x 72w x 6d in / 101.60h x 182.88w x 15.24d cm Commissioned for Making Place Matter at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia

Hatch has continually transformed the plate’s intimate scale into the monumental, an active assertion of taking up space, literally and figuratively. Linea Stack moves this into wholly new territory, off the wall into three dimensions. This sculptural leap takes up new artistic space as Hatch merges the snakeskin— and its transformational symbolism—with the ancestral influence inspired by her grandmother’s floral textile. The allure of golden luster coats the edges of the hexagonal brick assemblage, further asserting its sculptural presence while nodding to the gold-tipped border of a porcelain plate.

Excerpted and adapted from “In Place” in Making Place Matter: Cultural Identity, Community, and Clay. Jennifer Zwilling and Elizabeth Essner, Editors. (Philadelphia: The Head & The Hand, 2022). Available June, 2022 at theclaystudio.org/shop Elizabeth Essner, co-curator of Making Place Matter, is the recently appointed Windgate Foundation Associate Curator of Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

1

Molly Hatch, A Passion for China (September Publishing, 2017): 11.

See Plate, 1796, Porcelain with underglaze blue, enamel, and gilt decoration, Gift of the McNeil Americana Collection, 2006. Philadelphia Museum of Art (2006-3-7).

2

Molly Hatch, interview by the author and Jennifer Zwilling, May 21, 2021, Florence, MA.

See Plate, Showing the Philadelphia Waterworks, c. 1820-1830, Artist/ maker unknown, Chinese, for export to the American market, Hard-paste porcelain with underglaze enamel and gilt decoration. Purchased with funds contributed by the William B. Dietrich Foundation, 1992, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1992-133-1).

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3

5

Molly Hatch, email to the author, October 4, 2021.

Linea Stack, USA, 2021 Slip cast, hand-painted porcelain, underglaze, glaze, gold luster 35h x 52w x 12.50d in / 88.90h x 132.08w x 31.75d cm Commissioned for Making Place Matter at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia

Molly Hatch 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.

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 dinnerware is an anomaly to younger generations, having little or no importance to the relaxed, 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 previous generations. 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 motif.

The precise balance of old and new opens a space to

acknowledge our evolution in the 21st century in relation to aesthetics and ritual.

In the past decade, Hatch has become synonymous with contemporary ceramics, continuing her exploration of these methods and themes by applying them across an ever-evolving catalog of forms - plates, cubic vases with negative space imagery, pyramid forms that become three dimensional ceramic lenticulars. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally garnering her a loyal and fervent following.

Hatch grew up on an organic dairy farm in Vermont surrounded by a startlingly diverse set of visual influences: the earthy reality of rural life, and the mysterious luxury of antique decorative objects in her family’s collection.

Her mother’s family, prosperous Boston merchants, used Chinese export porcelain as ballast in their ships. Inspired by these two seemingly disparate family narratives, Hatch became an artist with a life-long passion for the decorative arts and the dialog between old and new.

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.

Physic Garden, a monumental site-specific 456-plate work, was installed in the entryway of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2014. The work was commissioned by the museum and used two Chelsea Porcelain Factory plates (c. 1755) from the museum’s Frances and Emory Cocke Collection of English Ceramics as inspiration for its floral motif. Another commission, Caughly Landscape, was installed at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta.

In 2017 Hatch installed her largest museum commission to date, titled Repertoire, in the historic Engelhard Court at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey. Honoring the museum’s 107-year-tradition of collecting contemporary ceramic art, and commemorating the retirement of Curator of Decorative Arts Ulysses Dietz after 37 years, the three parts of the installation were inspired by global textiles in the museum’s collection.

The western panel, “Dyula Woven,” is based on a rare earlytwentieth-century Dyula textile from Cote d’Ivoire, collected by the Museum’s founder, John Cotton Dana, in 1928. The central panel, “Qianlong Silk,” is based on a velvet throne carpet made in eighteenth-century China. The eastern niche takes inspiration from “Bergen Jacquard,” designed after a jacquard-woven blue and white coverlet made in Bergen County, New Jersey in the 1840s. Repertoire combines the iconography of the two great global art-forms of human creativity: clay and cloth.