Molly Hatch: Reverie

Artist and designer Molly Hatch grew up on an organic dairy farm in Vermont surrounded by antique decorative objects from her mother’s family, prosperous Boston merchants who used Chinese export porcelain as ballast in their ships. Hatch became an artist with a passion for the decorative arts and the dialog between old and new. “Reverie,” her first exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, is inspired by what Hatch describes as her “continued effort to claim the functional surface of the dinner plate as a painting surface.” Drawing from 18th- and 19th-century plates from her family’s own collection, Hatch has created a series of “plate paintings,” in which design elements from “source” plates are scaled up and applied on a grid of new plates, forming a new image.