Jim Hatch is a Berlin-based multi-discipline artist working across ceramics and film. His ceramic practice produces three-dimensional painting-like works — cast porcelain forms decorated with underglaze pencil and on-glaze transfers — while his film work includes surreal documentary series that blur the line between fact and fiction. Across both mediums, a single question persists: what is real and what is not? Hatch's ongoing ceramic series, Unfunctional Functional Forms, takes the functional traditions of pottery — vessels for heating, storing, cooking — and disfigures them. Awkwardly tall, impossibly thin porcelain vases retain just enough utility to honour thousands of years of ceramic purpose, while their strange proportions re-contextualise them as something else entirely. Decorative surfaces borrow freely from pop culture, kitsch imagery, and deliberately plagiarised sources, Jim plays social games and explores social concepts within society through my work. There is always an element of humour: irony runs through everything Hatch makes as he comments on the ridiculousness of the world through work that might or might not be serious — and that ambiguity is the point. Central to his practice is the use of repetitive symbols that recur across different collections and mediums — simple indicators and guides that connect people with ideas and worlds, or don't. His own face appears as a recurring motif, a gesture that is simultaneously self-promotional, absurd, and a provocation about celebrity, branding, and familiarity. Repetition builds recognition; recognition builds acceptance. If you repeat strange things long enough, people will eventually understand them — or at least stop questioning them. Hatch also produces artist merchandise — t-shirts, mugs, pencil cases, and multiples — bearing symbols, images, and motifs drawn from his major works. These are not souvenirs but a conceptual layer of the practice: lower-cost objects that allow access to the art while hearkening back to larger works through shared visual language. Merchandise is often thought of as cheapening something, and introducing it into the art world as a sales item is itself a statement — the act of somebody buying merchandise of the artwork becomes part of the art. Exhibitions function as installations in which the sale of branded objects is embedded in the work's meaning. His film practice operates on the same frequency. Rockumentary, a mockumentary supposedly about rocks but actually about people making a documentary about rocks, and the forthcoming True History (Outside the Echo Chamber), a fake history documentary series, both force viewers to question what they are watching, what is sincere, and what is performance — while simultaneously commenting on the psychologies and absurdities of contemporary society. Hatch's practice extends beyond objects and film into the performance of his own persona. His social media presence operates as a performed art piece — an ongoing exercise in blurring what is real and what is constructed. He plays social games and explores social concepts within society through his work, and through himself — the artist as character, faking it until it becomes real, at which point the question of whether it was ever fake stops mattering. "I like things that don't make sense. I also like taking something cheap and tasteless and creating value through art and decontextualisation — something that was disregarded is now taken seriously.” Some people will get it. Some won't. Some will think he's serious when he's not — but there's always the chance he is.