Meet the Artist: Molly Hatch

August 2024—Molly Hatch is a ceramic artist and designer best known for large-scale wall installations of her hand-painted ceramic plates. For nearly 20 years she has worked to merge the distinctive look of painterly surfaces with the physicality of ceramic forms. Drawing on the history of decorative arts and painting and interrogating the meaning of inherited objects in our lives, Hatch adroitly blends, deconstructs, and defamiliarizes traditional patterns and motifs. Scaling them up until they reach a degree of abstraction, she draws attention to unexpected connections across cultures and eras.

Commissioned as part of Sarasota Art Museum’s Inside Out Program, Hatch’s new site-specific installation, Amalgam (2023-24), spans two floors, visually linking the Jan Schmidt Loggia and Mark & Irene Kauffman Arcade. Consisting of more than 450 earthenware plates hand-painted in white, blue, and gold luster, Amalgam is conceived as one ensemble framed by the four arched windows. Hatch also plays with the empty spaces, so that viewers perceive lines and patterns between plates adjacent to each other. The whole composition may also be experienced from multiple points of view, from near and far, inside and outside of the Museum.

The patterns and motifs deployed in Hatch’s plates in Amalgam 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.

Hatch’s work has been exhibited internationally with permanent installations in many museums, including Physic Garden (2014) at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia and Repertoire (2017) at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey. In 2023, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada commissioned and acquired her work, Ducere, and she received commissions for new installations for the Tiffany & Co. Landmark store in Manhattan and Tiffany stores in Dubai and Taipei.

Amalgam at Sarasota Art Museum runs through April 2026