Rachel Maldovan used to make her living picking shrimp for a fishmonger in Bath. “I don’t like shrimp. I don’t eat shrimp. I don’t even like the smell of shrimp,” she says. “I was so unhappy.” So she took a chance and applied for a job at the pottery that, as a child growing up on the Boothbay peninsula, she had watched expand from a converted one-room schoolhouse to a rambling series of contemporary silvery gray barns whose outdoor crafts displays are among the area’s biggest summer attractions. In turn, Edgecomb Potters owners Richard and Christine Hilton took a chance on her. Under the Hiltons’ tutelage, Maldovan graduated from smoothing seams on soft, freshly molded pots to applying and firing temperamental glazes to embellishing the pieces with Richard’s signature brushstroke. “That was pretty special because Richard had trusted only one other person to do it,” Rachel says. “I practiced it so much that I dreamt about it. I found that because I had picked shrimp, I had the hands to do it.”
Maldovan is one of several people that pottery owners Christine and Richard Hilton have hired on the strength of their intuition rather than the conventional wisdom that said their potters should have formal training in the ceramic arts. In fact, Christine suggests, her employees’ lack of formal training has proven something of an advantage to what the Rand McNally Road Atlas called “one the most highly acclaimed art potteries in America.” Unencumbered by the rules, they are open to experimentation. “We push it,” Christine says. “Rachel is always pushing the glazes. We give her permission to create, and we give her permission to fail. Every time we open a kiln it’s like Christmas because you never know what is going to come out.”
Read the Edgecomb Potters story in the July 2011 issue of Down East magazine.
