Launa Eddy is a sculptor and jewelry maker living in Brooklyn. We were introduced to her via 3rd Ward and inspired by her collabs with Daniel Olshansky, Dinosaur Feathers, and most of all her interesting background. We asked her to elaborate on her timber wolf/lobster-catching youth and tell about some of her current work.
The 22 Magazine: Can you tell me a little about where you are from in Rhode Island, working on a lobster boat and about raising timber wolves ?
Launa Eddy: We lived in Richmond until I was ten, when the state of Rhode Island told us we couldn’t have wolves and gave us an ultimatum – get rid of them, or move out. So we moved to New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state – my dad continued to run [his] lobster boat between Rhode Island and New Hampshire. While in Rhode Island I spent most of my time off of Point Judith in Narraganset, where most of my family worked as commercial fishermen/women. I spent a lot of time on the boats and the docks growing up – and I actually started working on my father’s boat when I was around eight or nine years old. I would go out with them on fishing trips in the summer and I was their ‘bander’ – I put the rubber bands on the lobster claws and prepped them to be put in the storage tanks on the boat. It was a hard job and being out at sea for three days in all sorts of weather was intense, and eventually when I was sixteen I decided I wasn’t up for the job anymore… mostly because I was prone to sea sickness.When I wasn’t working on the boat, I was often trying to catch fish on the docks, and occasionally I got together with the other fisherman’s kids and we did silly things like arrange lobster and crab races. We’d gamble for curiosities we found on our families boats. Starfish, shells, weird creatures. Everyone would bring a box of things they found and put it in the pot for whoever won the race. As you can imagine, lobsters don’t race very well, and crabs are insane and run all over the place, so it was all very silly. The wolves were pure bred Alaskan timber wolves – my father went to Alaska for a trip to meet a painter who also ran a wolf rescue, and came back with two wolf pups. We named them Sinbad and Sheba, and built them an eight foot tall cage twice the size of our house (it was pretty much a caged off section of forest) and a sweet little dog house inside of it with two stories and Plexiglas windows and a ramp so they could chill on the roof. They had it good.
The 22 Magazine 