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All Dressed

Pattern Recognition: in conversation with Molly Hatch

The following is a metaphor, perhaps, that neither the ceramics artist Molly Hatch, nor Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ chief curator, intended with their collaboration for the Parall(elles) exhibit.

But the effect of entering the museum and walking up the staircase of the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, with Hatch’s breathtaking introductory installation, Ducere, unfolding in view is literally one of “stepping up to the plate.”

It’s a baseball analogy, a bit boyish for an exhibition of milestones in women’s design, and a little too on-the-nose, maybe. Nevertheless.

Ducere, from the Latin meaning “to lead,” is composed of 198 perfectly round dinner plates arranged in triptych, each plate hand-painted to recreate the psychedelic Islamicizing pattern Christopher Dresser designed for his 1872 Minton factory Moon Flask.

“A plate is an entry point to see artwork in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily have permission to otherwise,” says Molly Hatch.
©️Todd Merrill Studio

“They’re not hand-thrown,” admits Hatch, “which I often do in my studio. But in a grid layout, the readymade plates don’t distract you. Your eye fills in the blanks around the plates. The gold is an additional firing so the reflective metallic surface is there to mimic that Cloisonne technique which usually has brass or gold between the enamel. And that is real gold that’s applied after the glaze firing which is largely what you’re seeing painted there — anywhere from three to five layers of material, glazed.”

Dresser’s porcelain flask, an important Victorian-period piece from the “granddaddy of Industrial Design,” as Hatch calls him, is one of the Museum’s most recent acquisitions under Mary-Dailey Desmarais’s curatorial direction. Desmarais commissioned Hatch to design Ducere using the Moon Flask as a touchstone. No other artist could be better suited for this reboot.

“It was not only interesting from the point of view of activating our collection,” explains Desmarais, “but also showing a contemporary artist working within the medium of ceramics, that is a traditional medium used for centuries, and doing something entirely new with it. To see how this contemporary woman artist is navigating ceramic practice — doing a completely new take on a work of art in our collection, and something visually captivating, and also historically profound — was really interesting to us.”

Hatch’s star has been steadily rising over the past decade. Her exquisite and epic-scale ceramics were the subject of a 2013 solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Since, Hatch’s evermore astonishing earthenware designs have been commissioned for permanent installations at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey, and now, Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Hatch cleverly characterizes her work as “resetting the table,” but she can add another play on words with the baseball plate turn. For in sport as in life, the plate always means home.

“A plate is an entry point to see artwork in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily have permission to otherwise,” Hatch says. “Maybe it’s just enough to give people another minute to stay longer and say, ‘I understand that that’s a plate, and I understand that that’s a painting. How do you put those two worlds together?’ For me, that’s enough, even if it gives people a reason to stay another minute, or go home and take another look at their tableware and see it differently.”

First and foremost, Hatch’s work encourages audiences to reconsider our relationships with the transcendent world of capital ‘A’ art, the commercial sphere of industry, and the quotidian.

“Everyone has a relationship to a plate,” Hatch says. “They’re objects that we live with and eat with every day. They’re very basic and banal. But we have a relationship to the dishware that we live with and eat off of. My hope is that when you walk into a museum that has all the pretensions of the art world, all that baggage that comes with it, where you’re expected to know how to look at artwork, it gives people the opportunity who are not necessarily in the place of knowing how, or feel comfortable with that relationship to art.”

Molly Hatch (born in 1978), Ducere, 2022, glazed earthenware, underglaze hand painting. Courtesy of Todd Merrill Studio, New York. Photo MMFA, Jean-François Brière

Although Hatch also unfailingly uses her work to stake a claim as a legitimate contemporary artist working in a medium more traditionally associated with craft. “It’s an opportunity, too, to elevate ceramics,” Hatch argues, “to be seen as a painting. It’s a long, old conversation in the craft and design world: we have a different relationship with how the art world views that material, and I think it’s still something that needs elevating, rethinking, recontextualizing.”

Hatch is the granddaughter of a prominent Massachusetts merchant family who amassed a collection of 18th and 19th century objets d’art, a collection that had a profound impact on Hatch’s childhood aesthetic sensibilities. “My relationship to art and the permission I was given to enter it as a profession was from family,” explains Hatch. “There was a lot of access to a family history of objects, and to a certain time period of collecting objects in the Boston area. My great grandparents would have been colleagues of Isabella Stewart Gardner, so they had a lot of the same interests in decorative arts and painting and things like that in Boston society. There was an interesting time period of objects that we lived with that represented that family history, and some of those things I was struggling to understand.”

Hatch’s father was a dairy farmer. It was her mother, a painter, who encouraged her art practice. “My father is a very practical person,” Hatch says. “My mom married him, I think, for so many reasons. But she fell in love with his political passion for organic farming. So I grew up with a creative mother, but she absolutely gave up her aspirations of being a painter, outside of her own personal studio practice, to marry my father and buy into this very big passion of his. And I think he didn’t really understand the art side of her, or that family history. So I think it was interesting that I chose that. Growing up on a farm and having a grandmother who was independently wealthy were two different, opposing things for me to grapple with.”

That oppositional sensibility is what guides Hatch’s choices in subject matter. A thread of subversive tradition runs through her oeuvre — from Worcester Imari, 2015, which reinterprets a pair of 18th century vases from the Frances and Emory Cocke Collection in the High Museum of Art; to Illume, 2016, which presents a dialogue on the nature of Chinoiserie; and now to Ducere, the Dresser-inspired installation.

Moon flask with Islamicizing floral motifs (1872) Minton(s), Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, Bone china with enamel decoration and gilding. Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

“There’s a long history in ceramics of exporting and borrowing between cultures,” Hatch says. “Particularly in the West, we’re egregiously excited by other cultures and take what we want all the time. So for me, it’s a commentary about taking that apart and putting it back together. Owning it, but taking it apart and showing you a new way to look at it. In this particular case, there are so many different layers of excitement. I’m a female designer, an artist, working with history. Christopher Dresser was one of the most famous industrial designers at the turn of the century. And to have that opportunity to go back and say I’m looking at him through my female lens, and he’s looking at this pattern of a designer at a time when it was acceptable to appropriate imagery from another culture as he did, and create a new version of that for the British marketplace — for me, it’s an exciting place to dwell.”

Doubtless a problematic colonialist history comes attached to Dresser’s work. Although not every form of cultural appropriation is necessarily predatory.

Hatch recounts, “a lot of it started with Chinese ceramic exports and coming to understand that a lot of it was made specifically for the export market, and the imagery they were choosing was the imagery they thought the Europeans wanted. And the Europeans thought it was authentic Chinese imagery. And it was the first understanding that this is a real cultural fusion. This is a cross-cultural interpretation of each other in sometimes really comical ways and sometimes really beautiful ways.” For Hatch, cultures don’t just steal; they share, too.

“You have so many interpretations of each other that it becomes something we imbue with meaning,” she says. “Visual language is something we all can relate to because you don’t have to read it in the same way. It’s a visual thing that we all understand.”

The Museum of Fine Arts’ chief curator, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, specifically chose Hatch to tackle the task of deconstructing this particular past — and for this particular exhibition. “I think when we’re talking about the colonialist history of museums,” says Desmarais, “an artist like Molly Hatch is really interesting because she’s not denying history. She’s taking that history and doing something different and opening it up to new kinds of interpretation and new kinds of stories. And that’s what we really want to do here in the museum is not shy away from our past, but own up to it and open up the history by bringing new ways of seeing the works of art in our collection. Molly’s voice, Molly’s art, is an important part of that story.”

“An artist like Molly Hatch is really interesting because she’s not denying history.” MMFA Chief Curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais.

While Hatch’s practice gestures at complex narratives around fine art, craft, industry, and heritage, her work is deeply personal, too. “I really thought I wanted to be a painter,” Hatch recalls.

“And I thought I wanted to be a printmaker. And I thought I wanted to be a photographer. And I tried all those things. I loved painting, but I felt like I was making my mother’s paintings. I didn’t know how to be myself in that place. Ceramics resonated so much, and I think that’s partly because of my childhood on a farm. It’s taken me a long time to understand the metaphor of taking earth and painting on it and basically marrying my parents, physically, in my work. That’s something I’ve really come to understand lately. My dad understands that I’m making something functional and practical. Maybe it’s me making those plate paintings for my dad so that he can understand how to relate to the work, like, ‘Okay, you can still take it off the wall and eat from it.’”

Producing Ducere was a Herculean task that took nearly five months to complete. Nonetheless, Hatch still feels — like family, like home — that Dresser is a wellspring for creativity.

“The Moon Flask was such a rich place for me to hang out for a while,” Hatch recalls. “There’s some other work that needs to happen. I feel like there’s more there. Talk to me again in three years.”◼︎

Parall(elles): a history of women and design continues through May 28th at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

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999 Words

And All Things Nice: notes on Parall(elles): a history of women and design

Men like me love women.

There is a group of people, however, who love women even more than men like me, and that group is women. Women love women, man. Women love to celebrate all things by and for and about women. And why not? To me, at least, there is nothing lovelier in this world than that indefinable yet unmistakable assemblage of characteristics that constitutes essential femininity.

These days, asserting the existence of such a monolithic thing — womanhood — is a controversial pursuit; when even the word “women” is contested terrain, it is an implicitly political statement to drop it right into the title of a museum exhibition. Nonetheless, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts saw fit to go there, and for one of the stuffier of the city’s artistic institutions, it is a radically feminist rhetorical move.

Parall(elles): a history of women and design, which runs February 18th through May 28th in the museum’s Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, collects 250 objects that (genetic) women either created or contributed to significantly, focussing a spotlight specifically on achievements hitherto attributed to men — Denise Scott Brown, for example, the partner of the Pritzker Prize-winning American architect Robert Venturi, and the General Motors designer Ruth Glennie, whose reinvention of the ‘Fancy Free’ Corvette functions as the exhibition’s centrepiece.

The assumption in art history has always been that men created capital ‘A’ art, probably, when we started painting the Lascaux caves. But a 2013 scholarly study published in the journal American Antiquity suggests that more women than men might have been responsible for producing parietal art. The anatomical difference in men’s and women’s hands serves as the basis for these claims which, if true, indicate that women may have in fact made between 75 and 90 percent of Euro-American Upper Paleolithic hand stencils, widely considered to be humankind’s first acts of artistic creation.

Ironically, many of the pieces in this collection gesture towards more traditional notions of the economy of femininity and domesticity. Clara Driscoll’s Tiffany stained glass lamp, for instance, or Ray Eames’s iconic pieces of office furniture reveal the discursive sites that historically served as women’s points of entry into the arts. Eva Zeisel’s Museum Coffee Service, a minimal set of elegant ceramic carafes, cups, and saucers, and Molly Hatch’s monumental terracotta installation, which the MMFA commissioned especially for this exhibition, discreetly signal towards interiors as women’s purview. The home, the office, the kitchen, the bedroom, the passenger seat of a sports car — these were women’s places, spaces created by women’s work.

Parall(elles) cleverly sidesteps gender trouble to focus instead upon design trouble, calling into question the circumscriptions around craft, fine art, and industry, while leaving the notion of what represents womanhood to the spectator. In doing so, this collection also suggests a sort of Montréalaise coda to a centuries-old dance between two complementary and corresponding partners, XX and XY. It is almost as if the 251st piece in this collection is woman herself.

As recently as the 1990s, it was still radical to be a woman. From the Spice Girls to Ellen DeGeneres, from Girl Power to the Riot Grrrls Manifesto, from Anna Nicole Smith to Kim Campbell, women were leaning into traditionally masculine pursuits. The future seemed decidedly female. In the 90s, the theorist Judith Butler critiqued the notion of womanhood as a socially constructed and economically reinforced category that ultimately served a patriarchal power structure. Women were the negative space that shaped masculinity, a binary dialectic allowing men to rule the world. The parallel nature of this dichotomy has disintegrated as gender identities proliferate and their acknowledgment becomes evermore contentious. Will there be an exhibition in twenty or thirty or forty years celebrating the underrepresented contributions of trans people to the design world? Is all this inclusivity necessarily exclusionary?

To the spectators of this exhibition, and me, it should simply be a question of aesthetics. Identity is an extension of intention, and every good art historian knows that intention is a fallacy. It may be interesting at best to know what an artist intended by this work or that, just as it may be interesting to know the gender or sexuality or politics of the artist. But it is only paratextual evidence, one rung above gossip. There is a kind of windmill-tilting, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better notion to a show that makes women’s design its focus — a Rosie the Riveter rolled-up sleeves we can do it sense of spirit. But is that really necessary? Would this exhibition be any less spectacular if women’s work — so to speak — wasn’t brought to the fore? Can the works themselves stand on their own? I believe the answer is yes. Nonetheless, it is their assembly under the aegis of underrepresentation that makes Parall(elles) at once nostalgic and radical.

The Cleveland-born comedian and misogynist Drew Carey once had a joke in his routine about the common axiom that if the fairer sex ruled the world, there would have never been a war. Punctuated by Carey’s sarcastic Coke bottle-magnified eye roll, he retorts, “yeah right, like no woman has ever started a fight for no reason.” In this joke lies men’s fundamental ambivalence toward women. Men tend to attend women’s proud roar as vaguely hostile, somewhat hypocritical, tinged with a smug sense of self-superiority, but also paradoxically attractive. Conflict is sexy. It drives the story.

Parall(elles) seems anachronistic in this era when personal pronouns are beginning to outnumber the people they designate, when even abortion rights groups are banning the term “woman,” and when digital technology has curiously cultivated a less binary world. But to men like me, and to women like those represented in this exhibition, there is a certain strength in reasserting traditions and recognizing historical struggles that should be amplified, not muted, by the allied marginalia.

If there exists an implicit argument about womanhood in Parall(elles), it is a characteristically female one: make the fight about something else.◼︎

Parall(elles): a history of women and design runs February 18th through May 28th at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

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