There is something special about the way Jeannie Laub carves the spirit of the sea into wood. That’s not our description — it’s what people who see her work say, fairly consistently, because the work earns it.
Jeannie works in Eastport, Maine — the easternmost city in the United States, a fishing and working waterfront town where lobster boats and the Atlantic are part of daily life. That context is not incidental to her sculpture. Her signature pieces are hand-carved lobster boats made from live-edge wood: the natural edge of the wood preserved, the grain visible, the boat shape emerging from the material rather than being imposed on it.
They come in navy blue and white, natural wood, or sometimes red — the colors of a working harbor. The large ones run two feet by six feet. Some have gone bigger: a seven-foot piece, red, was donated for a maritime charity auction. These are wall sculptures that command a room in the way that good functional craftsmanship often does. You notice them immediately and then keep looking.
The boats aren’t the only thing. Jeannie also carves whales — large wall pieces, 40 and 53 inches, the kind of thing described as a “dramatic statement piece, original, one-of-a-kind” without that being an exaggeration. There are wooden fish in multiple sizes, mermaids, hand-turned pens, candle holders, small serving boards. The range is wide, but there’s a consistent sensibility running through it: coastal Maine, working waterfront, the ocean as a place people actually live in and with.
One of her most distinctive pieces used 200-year-old Southern Pine salvaged from the historic Housak Building in Eastport. The timber carries the weight of that history in ways that newer wood simply can’t. The resulting sculpture was priced as the heirloom it is.
That salvaged timber piece points to something important about how Jeannie thinks about material. Live-edge wood is chosen specifically because the natural edge matters — it’s not a flaw to be trimmed away, it’s the piece. Two-hundred-year-old Southern Pine from a historic Eastport building is chosen because the wood has a story the work should carry forward. Nothing about this is accidental.
Her work is best experienced in person — the scale of the large lobster boats, the grain of the live-edge, the weight of the pieces. At the Edgecomb gallery, her sculptures bring the working Maine coast into a space that’s been holding Maine’s material culture for decades. She fits here.