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Molly Hatch uses ceramics as both her source material and primary artistic medium. She extracts motifs from historic ceramics and recontextualizes them by painting them on hand-formed earthenware plates. The work that inspired Ducere was the Museum’s Moon flask, an enamelled and painted porcelain vase manufactured in 1880 by the English pottery Minton. Designed by Christopher Dresser, Moon flask bears a luxurious ornamentation derived from the phoenix and lotus-scroll patterns found on Chinese Ming-period enamelled wares. Hatch’s reappropriation of Dresser’s design, which itself reproduces earlier Chinese motifs, exemplifies how ornamentation has been continually renegotiated throughout the history of design.