She is self-taught in the art of glass etching and engraving. Today, Brown etches and engraves a wide range of glass, wood, acrylic, bone and metal material. Brown is also a published children’s author with her latest book, Bedtime in Nunatsiavut released by Arsenal Pulp Press in the spring of 2022. She is an advocate of Indigenous issues and often creates and writes about past and present events that affect Indigenous across Canada.

Brown’s work has been featured in the exhibition SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut and the 2019 Labrador Winter Games. In 2019 she made the top 30 small businesses in Canada as part of the FedEx small business prize, and she was long-listed for the 2021 CBC short story prize.

In 2018, she was asked to create commemorative etched glasses for residential school survivors in the community of North West River, NL. Currently, Brown sells her work from her website and retail shop and ships throughout the world, or at a variety of storefronts in Newfoundland and Labrador. Brown and her husband are also working with the Nunatsiavut Government to re-branding their promotional items for their Education Department.

About Bedtime in Nunatsiavut

Bedtime in Nunatsiavut is a sweet, beautiful book for children depicting the transformative dreams envisioned by a young Inuk girl, with the help of her loving mother.

In Bedtime in Nunatsiavut, a little girl named Nya yearns to fly, swim, and wander like the goose, salmon, bear, fox and other animals that populate her world. Each night, her loving Ananak (mother) tucks her into bed and gives her a kunik (nose-to-nose rub) to help Nya dream and transform into the animals she longs to be like.

In Nya’s dreams, she moves with the wonder and the freedom of the natural world, dancing beneath the dark Nunatsiavut skies, empowered and emboldened by her Ananak’s constant love. Written and illustrated by first-time author Raeann Brown, Bedtime in Nunatsiavut is a beautiful and joyful tribute to an Inuit childhood.

As Raeann Brown says of her practice:

My work explores the relationship between pre-colonization and the aftereffects of it.
It includes influences from my Inuit culture, life experiences and the beauty and
oppression of being an Indigenous woman in a dominant White society.

Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the essential unreality of the world.
What starts out as vision, soon becomes manipulated into images or words of power,
leaving only a sense of decadence and the inevitability of a new beginning.

As images and words become etched into glass and paper through studious and
personal practice, the viewer is left with a tribute to the darkness of our country’s history,
the inaccuracies of our world and the resilience of Indigenous peoples.