Jasmine Freeman is a jeweller and writer from Edmonton, AB, who is now based in Abbotsford, BC. Best known for selling earrings online under the handle @nunaaluk, Freeman also publishes fiction and personal essays online through blog platform Medium.
Freeman has been writing for most of her life, and began keeping a journal in kindergarten. “Writing has been with me since I can remember,” she says. [1] Beading is a more recent addition to her artistic practice, one she began in 2021. “Beading was an accident,” says Freeman, explaining that she tried to buy a pair of earrings for a friends’ birthday that were perpetually sold out, and ended up making earrings herself instead. “I didn’t expect it to turn into what it has turned into, and to have a business,” she says.
Of the two mediums, Freeman feels more at home writing, explaining the sense of peace, healing and comfort writing brings her, particularly following her solo move to Abbotsford from Edmonton. Her personal essays address both her own life events as well as the treatment of Indigenous people in Canada more broadly. Her fictional work also has a personal tie, but tends to contain subject matter that is uncomfortable for Freeman to write about in a non-fiction setting.
Beading has become a way for Freeman to reconnect with her Inuit roots, as well as a calming, meditative activity that she enjoys. “When you strip away the business aspects of it,” says Freeman, “weaving bead after bead next to each other is a methodical process, it’s meditative.” Her beaded work almost exclusively involves tasselled earrings, shaped either as a feather or the more conventional tasselled fringe shape employed by many other Indigenous beaders. What makes her earrings unique is the emphasis on gradients—for Freeman a symbol of change and transition—and geometric shapes like circles and triangles, as well as heavy use of the colour red in a variety of shades.
Both sides of her practice are influenced by her mother, who taught her the importance of failure. “She told me that if I’m not willing to fail, then maybe I should question if I should get started,” says Freeman. In her practice, this means pushing on even when a beaded design or a written piece isn’t turning out as expected.
While Freeman is currently working on a holiday earring release, she’s on the lookout for new opportunities with her practice. “I haven’t even been doing this for a year,” she says. “I think I’m still in the exploratory phase of figuring out what’s me.”