I grew up at the Edgecomb studio. My first paid job, as a kid, was washing the drying boards — the big racks the pottery sits on. Five cents a board. Then ten. When they bumped me up to a quarter, I decided I'd never wash another board as long as I lived. So I quit washing boards and moved on to the rest of the studio. Over the years, there are only a few jobs in that place I haven't touched.
My roots there go deep. I spent whole summers building forts in the woods out back — Fort A, Fort B, all the way to Fort D. The studio. The Balducci Farm right across the road. That little corner of Maine is stitched into me.
But somewhere, home got heavy. The hour drive started feeling like a weight. We lost Richard in 2011. Chris got sick. We lost Dalton. And the building started showing every one of its fifty years — the roof, the long days, the tired hands.
Somewhere along the way, home started feeling further away.
The efforts of the past months paid off. And instead of dread,
I was greeted by
dreams.
Bath Iron Works on the right, Wiscasset crawling by, over the bridge — and home.
What I felt instead was joy.
Pulling into the parking lot and seeing the color pour out of the gallery gave me warmth.
Walk through these doors and you walk into a place filled with hopes, dreams, passions, and love. Opening the gallery up to a co-op was one of the best decisions we've made in a long time. I can't sit here and say it fixes everything, or that it's all going to work out. Edgecomb can't be what it was — but that doesn't mean it can't be something new, something special. And the only reason there's anything left to build on is the people who never stopped showing up — the staff who kept the doors open, the artists who kept making, all of them carrying this place through years that would have flattened most.
The more I walked around, the more I realized how many dreams are wrapped up in this place. My parents' certainly, and mine — but more than that, everyone who's worked here, everyone who's shopped here, all the artists who've filled these shelves with their work. They're the ones who turned it into something. All those dreams, passing through one small gallery in Maine. That's what I drove to on Saturday. And I'm proud to continue to be a part of something special, in our little corner of Maine.
Thanks for being here.
— brad
P.S. — there are new mugs, fresh out of the kiln.