Jeremy Hatch, a Canadian-born ceramic artist based in Bozeman, Montana, has spent much of his career translating everyday and often deeply personal objects into porcelain. Known online as @recollectiontoys, he works primarily through slip casting, a mold-based process that lets him reproduce an object’s exact proportions and surface detail while swapping its original material for something far more fragile. Hatch holds an MFA in ceramics from Alfred University and has built a teaching career alongside his studio practice, currently serving as an associate professor at Montana State University; in 2008 he also founded Ricochet Studio, a design lab built around collaborative, limited-edition ceramic work.
His ongoing project, titled The ReCollection, recasts his entire childhood action-figure collection in porcelain, a direct response to growing up during the 1980s, when deregulated children’s advertising fueled a boom in tie-in toys and cartoons. By rendering hyper-masculine, combat-ready characters in a material historically associated with fragility, luxury, and domestic display, Hatch deliberately unsettles the read on their original aggression; the once-rugged figures take on a smooth, glossy, almost ornamental quality that has nothing left of the scuffed plastic they were copied from. The shift in material does the conceptual work: proportions and molded detail stay faithful to the source toys, but porcelain’s cool, reflective surface reframes them as collectible objects closer to fine china than to a toy chest.
Hatch situates this body of work within a longer engagement with 18th-century decorative arts, folding historical porcelain forms and figurines into his toy-based pieces to produce hybrid, fictional souvenirs that sit somewhere between antique curio and pop-culture relic. The series has been shown in a solo exhibition at the University of Central Missouri’s Gallery of Art and Design, where curators described the finished pieces as pulling people in through craftsmanship before the subject matter registers, producing a jolt between admiration for the material and recognition of the source imagery. Beyond its formal precision, the project functions as a quiet study of how mass marketing shaped a generation’s imagination, using the permanence and status of porcelain to ask what happens when disposable, mass-produced culture is treated with the same care traditionally reserved for heirlooms.
More info: Instagram (h/t: Red Lodge Clay Center).
