Jo Philipsen has been hooked on pottery since the day she got a wheel. That’s her word for it — hooked. Not inspired, not drawn to, hooked. The kind of feeling that reorganizes your priorities and doesn’t apologize for it.
She works from a home studio in Waldoboro, Maine, in the midcoast. Stoneware clay, wheel-thrown and hand-built. Her specialty is bowls — she’ll tell you that immediately. Ring dishes, small serving bowls, large platters with organic rims, each one a little different because that’s what happens when you make something by hand a thousand times and still find it interesting.
But bowls aren’t the whole story. She makes pitchers, sugar bowls, match holders, small trays with beach pebbles pressed into the clay for texture. That last technique is worth pausing on: she takes actual beach stones and uses them as molds, so the surface of the piece carries the impression of the specific rocks that shaped it. The coast isn’t just her aesthetic — it’s her toolbox.
Jo uses beach pebbles as molds for some of her pieces, pressing them into fresh clay before firing. The resulting surface carries the impression of the actual stones — each piece unique, each one shaped by something that came from the same landscape as the glazes that cover it.
The glazes are the other half of the story. Ocean blue, charcoal, speckled moss green, mustard, ice blue — the palette maps to the midcoast landscape she and her husband spend time in. They walk, hike, paddle, bike. The colors she works with come from real places and real light conditions. Not approximations, not moods.
The name Coastal Maine Drifts describes the work accurately. There’s a drifting quality to the forms — edges that aren’t squared, rims that follow the clay rather than fighting it. Functional, but not rigid. Made to be used every day, which is exactly what Jo says bowls are for.
She got there the way a lot of potters do: a gift. A big blue handmade pottery bowl, one of her wedding presents, still in use decades later. Bowls became the thing she looked for, the thing she gave, the thing she eventually needed to make herself. Once she had a wheel, the rest followed.
You can find her work at markets around midcoast Maine — The Wharf in Camden, and elsewhere through the season — and now at the gallery in Edgecomb, where her glazes sit comfortably alongside the Sheepscot River light that inspired them.