Jim Hatch

Das sagt der/die Künstler:in:

Jim Hatch (b. 1991, Australia) was raised in rural Australia as the son of two potters — his mother, Suzanne Forsyth Hatch, whose work is held in Australian national gallery collections, and his father, Richard Hatch — whose combined experience in ceramics spans over a century. Creativity runs through his extended family: his uncle managed rock musicians in 1970s and '80s California, and his grandmother was a radio DJ in Texas, working alongside artists including Buddy Holly. Rather than following directly into ceramics, Hatch spent a decade working in music and film across Leeds, Amsterdam, and Berlin — a period that sharpened his instinct for performance, persona, and the surreal. In 2021, while living in Mallorca, he created the mockumentary Rockumentary — supposedly about rocks, but actually about people making a documentary about rocks — an early experiment in the reality-blurring that now defines his practice. He is currently developing True History (Outside the Echo Chamber), a fake history documentary series that questions contemporary psychologies and societal absurdities through fabricated historical narrative. In 2024, back in Australia with his parents, Hatch returned to ceramics through The Pottery Cooking Show, Pottery With My Parents, a YouTube series that became his entry point into mould-making, slip casting, and ceramic transfer printing. By early 2025 he had transformed his Berlin flat into a workshop and produced his debut series, Unfunctional Functional Forms — awkwardly proportioned porcelain vases that honour ceramic tradition while refusing to function as expected. The series has been exhibited in solo presentations at Mindseye, Melbourne and Haus Der Statistik, Berlin, as well as in the group exhibition I am who? WHO AM I? at One Call Gallery, Berlin. Hatch's broader practice extends into artist merchandise — t-shirts, mugs, and multiples bearing recurring symbols and motifs from his larger works — treating the act of buying merchandise as a conceptual gesture embedded within the artwork itself.