Artist Highlight: Danielle Hatch

Collaboration, and female friendship specifically, is central to my art practice. I was raised by a single mother, spent the majority of my free time growing up playing team sports, and attended a women’s college, so being surrounded by strong women will always feel like home to me.

In my work, I mine my personal experience of motherhood and femininity in an effort to highlight constructs of inequity and give form to the emotional histories of women. I explore the connections between humans and landscape as a form of feminist world-building, a way to imagine a better future based on mutual respect, care and reciprocity and devoid of the myth of individualism. I seek to break capitalist, patriarchal, and colonialist binary archetypes.

All The Soarings Of My Mind Begin In My Blood, 2020 was based on a model of reciprocal and collaborative processes which yield collective creation and action. The title for the performance is from an excerpt in Letters to a Young Poet (1903) by Rainer Maria Rilke. I first heard the quote during an “On Being” podcast interview read by host Krista Tippett.

All The Soarings Of My Mind Begin In My Blood took place on the 2020 Fall equinox, in the remote desert of Eastern Utah. The genesis for this project began in 2018 while I was working as an English instructor for a refugee family in Dallas. During this time, I began researching my own ancestors and discovered a book of oral histories by women who had fled to and from Mexico over the last century and a half. In reading the personal narratives of these women, who made this arduous journey in wagons and on foot, I began to conceive of a performative work that would ritualize a connection to my own ancestors who have crossed landscapes and borders.

The equinox, or the moment when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator, was selected as the performance date because the constant celestial movement of the sun is often recognized as a parallel to the human body moving across terrestrial landscapes. With this performance I foreground the cyclical nature of human migration, eschewing linear narratives in favor of a circular understanding of relationships and movement. I am thinking about migration as a phenomenon that has spanned centuries and encompassed movement in many directions. I chose to cite this performance in the landscape bordering Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels as the tunnels connect the individual in the isolated landscape with the universe, as the sun and stars are framed within the cylinders.

The performance consisted of seven female participants and myself walking through the landscape in a choreographed formation coinciding with an auditory element of chanting. All the female participants wore hand-embroidered dresses and I wore an enormous circular quilted backpack.

Inspired by the author James Baldwin’s statement that “we are our history, we carry our history with us,” the backpack is worn as a literal manifestation of this historical weight, and the quilt is referenced as a symbol of the often unseen labor of women’s hands.

Utilizing a multidisciplinary format, Hatch explores the female body’s relationship to the built environment, notions of artificiality, and power structures through site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances. She received her BA in architecture from Wellesley College and an MFA in Spatial Studies from UC Santa Barbara in 2008.