
Quotable Speaker Series: Molly Hatch
Saturday, April 27, 2024 | 1 pm
Molly Hatch (American, born 1978) 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 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 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.
Commissioned as part of Sarasota Art Museum’s Inside Out exhibition program, Molly Hatch’s Amalgam is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Gold Sponsors
Jane and Phillip Humann
Donna Pickup
Silver Sponsors
Cowles Charitable Trust
Edward and Elizabeth Gardner Foundation Trust
Mark and Irene Kauffman
Roxanne Permesly
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.
Hatch lives and works in Florence, Massachusetts.