A Conversation with Molly Hatch

In this conversation with artist Molly Hatch,
co-curators Jennifer Zwilling and Elizabeth Essner discuss the ways in which history, memory, and the domestic overlap in her work for Making Place Matter.

Elizabeth Essner: You often look to historic decorative arts as your source material. Where did you begin for Making Place Matter?

Molly Hatch: I’ve used the Philadelphia Museum of Art collections to reflect history back onto itself. I’m thinking of this project as something for the community and the city. Looking back at history puts me in direct conversation with what’s come before me. My work is there to give audiences a connection with the past—to put ourselves in context with a broader understanding of how we got to be who we are today.

It’s not surprising that I’m drawn to domestic objects because those are the things that connect us to our ancestors. I had done some research before visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art and knew the parts of the collection that I wanted to see—the George and Martha Washington plate, and the dinner service depicting the Philadelphia Waterworks. I particularly love exports from China to the European market because they belong neither here nor there. It’s not exactly Chinese, it’s not exactly European—in a sense, they really don’t belong to anyone.

Jennifer Zwilling: They belong to the world, to globalization. The appropriation story is complex because the Chinese were experts, the Europeans had money and clout, and Americans were really desperately trying to prove that they were sophisticated and worthy of being a nation.

MH: Our country’s history of becoming itself is very much wrapped up in something as simple as a plate. There’s a lot going on in the one made for Martha Washington. When I saw it, I remembered the fifteen states linked by a chain—such a passionate declaration of America as a unified group. The symbolism is direct in an almost innocent way, as if declaring unification on a plate would make it so.

I hadn’t remembered the ouroboros—the snake eating its tail—but when I saw the plate in the museum, the ouroboros just leapt out at me. The eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth seemed like an interesting symbol for that period of time—very non-Christian and contemporary. It felt like something that people could relate to today. The Clay Studio is going through it right now; the neighborhood is going through it right now. To me, the ouroboros felt symbolic of not only our nation’s history, but of Philadelphia’s history.

JZ: We’re destroying ourselves to recreate ourselves.

MH: Yes. We’re going through a cycle of destruction in an effort to rebirth ourselves as more conscious and aware. How many times do we do this in our own life? In Linea Stack, I introduce myself into the piece by juxtaposing snakeskin patterns with floral wallpaper inspired by my grandmother. This is me rebirthing my own story, and maybe destroying some of it in the process.

JZ: It’s also important to talk about colonial history and the acknowledgement of creation, destruction, and rebirth within that cycle we’re still in right now. Talking about our own personal histories in the United States is important, and it’s also important to acknowledge that it was problematic.

MH: Yes, Ouroboros is tied back to the history of the city and the country, and acknowledging our part. While it might not feel like we’re connected to that time, we are still in the process of rethinking ourselves, rebirthing ourselves in that eternal cycle of recreating what is America.

But the work is not didactic. People can interpret it with their own story. I’m not telling you what that ouroboros cycle means to you.

EE: To be in your studio and see Ouroboros in person, the work maintains a human scale—you create a one-to-one relationship within these large works. As a viewer, you can understand each individual plate, while also having a physical connection to the whole installation as a monumental work.

MH: I realized very early on that in order for someone to have a very clear, concrete understanding, my work would need to be an icon of a plate—round with no descriptors. So, when I’m making work a lot of my shapes are basic, which allows you to understand the plate form intrinsically—then you can go into seeing the surface of each individual plate and also the installation of plates as a whole image. The plate form is a vehicle to understand visual information, for me to deliver something to you.

When I had finished installing my work Physic Garden at the High Museum in Atlanta, I was sitting with Sarah Schleuning, then the curator of Decorative Arts.
The piece had just opened to the public and there was a little girl who was with her mom. The girl trundled up to me: “Did you paint that?” She knew intuitively. I nodded, and she responded, “I’m a painter, too.” She saw the plates, she understood them as plates, but she knew that it was a painting. She completely got it—I almost started crying. If that eight-year-old kid so confidently understood the work, I did my job as an artist.

JZ: And she saw herself in it, too.

EE: Yes, this is why representation is so essential—whether by identity or interest—walking into that museum and seeing some part of yourself or your history connects you.

MH: I’ve always revered the museum, but I didn’t really have access to museums growing up. I always liked old things, but I think that’s because I grew up in a house where you didn’t buy furniture. You inherited it or you found it. My parents didn’t have the money to buy new things so I think the museum was a way for me to con- nect to and learn about objects I grew up with.

As a kid on the farm, we didn’t have a lot of resources—money was tight. Then I would go to my grandmother’s house, which was a classic Boston Brahmin home filled with antiques, paintings, decorative arts, books, and old rugs. These treasures had all sort of descended from grace—for instance, my grandmother would hand paint patterns back in where the rug had worn out. My grandmother was a painter, had an Ivy League education, was a hat model in the 1930s and smoked Virginia Slim 100s—she was poised and elegant and completely of another world. She largely didn’t have to work, but painted portraits of people’s homes as a way to make a living. My mother is a painter and my dad was a farmer when they met. They had both rejected their upper middle class upbringings in order to make their own way as dairy farmers. My experience of my grandmother’s house was such a contrast to my own life on a farm—hauling buckets of water, growing and preserving our own food and hot summers in the hay fields. It was bizarre to have this dichotomous childhood where those two ways of living were presented to me as options, there was almost no middle ground.

JZ: You’ve said that visiting museums was how you became interested in ceramic history, because you wanted to research your family’s things, which made you dive deeper.

MH: I needed to find out for myself because no one else was teaching me. I think the museum became important for me as a live art history book. I grew up with a reverence for art and objects thanks to the inherited objects I lived with and visited at my grandmother’s—I understood them as having value and being important because they were passed down. Going to a museum puts those objects into a larger context of history. If those objects could tell me where they have been...if you really unpack the story of something it becomes much more interesting; it’s about the entire social history behind it.

EE: Your work is responsive to its history, but also to its place. When you’re creating an expansive piece, like the works in Making Place Matter, it strikes me that you’re taking the intimacy of one thing, like a plate, and translating it into the monumental.

MH: It’s exciting for me to be able to do that as a service to historic objects, and to amplify them in a way that they couldn’t on their own. There’s a change of understanding of an object when its surface shifts in scale. When I reflect historic objects in larger more monumental pieces, every tiny little china painter’s brush stroke becomes a big gesture, which you can see in Philadelphia Waterworks. It’s fascinating to understand how much detail those painters put into each plate, because I am doing it on a much broader scale. I see each stroke in a new and different way.

EE: And metaphorically, the memories of the past take on new, different, and perhaps even more importance in the present. All of a sudden, this moment that might have been small at that time, becomes big—like your grandmother’s collection.

JZ: And when you’re making these domestic things big—there’s a connection to the feminist mantra of taking up space. There’s a connection between your family’s history, now coming full circle into your own motherhood and supporting your family.

MH: My mother and my grandmother were (and are) painters. They didn’t share that creative process with me—it was theirs, solely for themselves. So for me, becoming an artist myself came out of needing to know what artmaking provided for my mother and grandmother, and, as a result I have my own studio. Having a creative practice for myself gives me a deeper connection and understanding of my maternal lineage. In making my work, not only am I rectifying the dichotomies of my up- bringing for myself and for my own daughter, but in my career, I balance a different kind of dichotomy by maintaining both a design and fine art practice that supports my family financially, as well as allowing me to pursue my artistic vision. I’m allowing my fine art and design work to inform each other. Even when designing objects—I am thinking about the past within the present. I’m always trying to marry two ideas through making old things new again. What better thing is there to do really, than to put yourself in a conversation with history? It has become a rich place to operate from, a deep well that will never dry up.

*This conversation has been edited and condensed.

MOLLY HATCH, b. 1978

Artist Molly Hatch’s singular focus on the domestic covers vast territory, as she is known both for her large-scale ceramic art installations and a thriving design studio. The artist received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, followed in 2009 by a prestigious Arts/Industry residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. Hatch’s first major solo exhibition was at The Clay Studio, which led to collaborative design work for Philadelphia-based retailer Anthropologie as well as design partnerships with many other retailers worldwide, and, more recently, her own line of ethically produced design products. Concurrently, Hatch developed her signature plate paintings— large-scale installations of hand-glazed plates—which draw directly from historical decorative arts. Hatch’s childhood fascination with her family’s heirloom Chinese export porcelain—originally ship ballast used by her Boston merchant ancestors—was in stark contrast to her Vermont dairy farm upbringing. The artist’s personal interest in art history has grown into major works for Atlanta’s High Museum and the Newark Museum, among others.

Hatch returns to The Clay Studio for Making Place Matter with a series of mon- umental works drawn from Philadelphia’s history and her own heritage to reveal new ways of understanding cultural memory.