Progress Report: High Museum

I am now well into the painting of my plates for my installation in the High Museum lobby in March. One panel is complete, fired and ready to go and I am almost finished with the second panel--only 6 more to go!

Here are some images of the process on the first panel:

What you see here is the projector overlaying the blank plates. Each panel for the piece is roughly 60 plates!

The plates take up one entire wall of my studio, requiring the full size of my studio space for the right scale of projection. Even then, the piece has to be painted in 8 sections in order to be completed!

I am working up the paintings as one would on canvas, painting in layers of color. Each layer builds a richer color and line. Here you can see a lighter blue underpainting of the flower. Below the flower is complete with 2 additional layers of underglaze.

This is the first panel of 8 complete before firing. The plates are removed form the wall at this stage and glazed by hand, then fired to completion. Keep an eye out next week for an update on panel two, this time I will include images of the glazing process!

High Museum Project: Materials

All of the 500 plates for the project arrived last week--and so did all of the AMACO underglazes! We have quite the rainbow of a palette for this project--amazing to see how much underglaze it will take to paint 500 plates!

Next week we will start hanging plates and painting!

High Museum Project: Government shut-down!

A couple weeks ago I announced that I will be working for the next four-five months on hand-painting over 450 plates for an installation in the lobby at the High Museum in Atlanta. Last week I received one palette of plates from a domestic distributor that wasn't quite enough for the entire project, so I was waiting on the rest of the plates coming in a shipping container from the factory in Italy in late October. I was still going to be short on the number of plates for the project, but the curators at the museum were ok with making the overall composition a bit smaller to accommodate the available plates and everything seemed to be on track after lots of phone calls and re-working of art...then came the government shut down.

Last week, I was listening to NPR on my way to dropping my daughter at pre-school and the segment on the radio was discussing the backlog of shipments getting through customs in the US due to lack of personnel to process shipments in customs. Normally this wouldn't have concerned me, but I realized that my project was going to be further delayed by a shipment being stuck in customs! The possibility of not getting the plates I needed in time was unfortunate...what to do?

Thankfully the distributor I have been working with was well stocked with enough inventory of an alternative plate that will do the trick and I can stick to the original design. I write this as I await the second shipment of all 500 plates coming on a freight truck this afternoon. Little did I know that my project could be affected by the shut-down!

Also, I want to officially say a huge thank you to AMACO for supporting this project! Much of the glaze and underglaze that will go into making this large painting happen is coming from my friends at AMACO. 

ANNOUNCING:High Museum Commissions Molly Hatch Plate Painting: "Physic Garden"

I have been itching to announce a very exciting commission I will be working on over the next 5 months for the High Museum in Atlanta! I will be hand-painting over 400 italian plates with imagery sourced from 2 plates in the English Ceramics permanent collection at the High Museum to create a large wall painting installation in the lobby/entry of the museum. Plates are being installed as a painting in a museum lobby! I am so excited that ceramics are being given this kind of attention on a museum level. It feels like a big win!

Here are the two English Chelsea Porcelain plates that I have used as source material for the project surface design. It was exciting to go to the museum and walk the archives to look at the pieces that the museum has that are under appreciated. These plates are incredibly well crafted and I fell in love immediately.

Here is the design I submitted with my proposal. Each circle in this image represents one plate! I will work from this design to hand-paint each plate over the coming months.This process has taken almost two years to make happen, so as you can imagine I am really happy that it is a "go". 

Here you see a "to scale" image. The wall that the piece will go on is 22' high by 17' wide. The piece will almost fill the entire wall, top to bottom in a mural-like plate painting. In order to paint the piece in my 350 square ft studio, I will break up the composition into 8 parts.

This is 15 cases of over 40 cases of plates that will be arriving over the next couple months from a factory in Italy that will be making all the blanks!

Please keep up with my progress as I will be posting on Mondays or Tuesdays each week with progress reports, snafus and successes as the journey of making a plate painting of this scale unfolds over the next 5 months. Right now, I am waiting with my fingers crossed that all of the plates arrive safely and on time, because there isn't much room for breakage. The factory sent me everything they had!

I cant wait to hear your thoughts as this all continues--Happy Tuesday!