An Interview With Julie Gladstone

Transmutations, 2025. Oil, embroidered raw canvas, lace tablecloth on canvas (24 x 36 inches). Photography courtesy of Wall Space Gallery and the artist.

When artists use mixed media in their work, it’s particularly exciting to me when the materials involved have a personal resonance. This type of creative storytelling requires so much vulnerability on the part of the artist, allowing the work to find thematic transcendence by covering complex larger concepts with their fingerprints. There’s a spirit activated in these objects, no matter how mundane, as they’re enshrined in a visual landscape laden with intention.

Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Julie Gladstone’s recent pieces—a selection of paintings in oil and in acrylic, as well as embellished ink works on paper—are infused with narratives of identity, displacement, the experience of motherhood and a connection to protective enchantment through the application of embroidery threads, segments of knitted yarn, pieces of heirloom lace tablecloth and garments, household ephemera and childhood effects. They have titles like Nothing Went As Planned and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry iv; names drawn from life’s vagaries and various duties that imply the certainty of uncertainty, and the cyclical nature of our everyday.  

Gladstone, whose practice also includes music, writing, sculpture and curating, is perhaps best known for her vibrant abstract oils; canvases pulsing with the power of colour and the amulets she often paints into their scenes. In her newest series, Threads of Memory, hue and form are amplified as she augments each work with the inclusion of materials both meaningful and merely at her disposal.

Alchemical Map 4, 2025. Ink, interference watercolour, embroidery thread and lace on Stonehenge paper (5.5 x 7.5 inches). Photography courtesy of Wall Space Gallery and the artist.

“My work is a way of repairing the world,” Gladstone notes in the exhibition text for the duo show—also called Threads of Memory—that she is in alongside Olivia Mae Sinclair at Ottawa’s Wall Space Gallery. “It’s a process of integrating art and healing, a ritual of stitching together fragments of the past—whether they’re family heirlooms, found objects, or everyday detritus. These pieces embody the idea of ‘Tikkun Olam’—repairing the world through creative, mindful action. I think of the process as an alchemical transformation."

Transformation has been on Gladstone’s mind in other ways as well. When discussing her experience at the 20th anniversary conference at the Museum of Motherhood in Florida a few months ago, she highlights how her role as mother has evolved her artistry.

“I look back on my practice and what happened when I became a mother,” she says. “[It] veered towards textile and performance and photography and video—essentially branching away from painting. But then I started painting again and realized that I have two forks in the river that is my practice, which almost represent my previous life and my new life. I find I’m answering questions like, who am I now? What am I moving toward? It feels like an important moment for me in creating some a new path forward from this split.”

Gladstone has also delved deeply into her Sephardic ancestry in her latest works, and here, she discusses intertwining the past, present and future through motif and materiality.

Let’s start by discussing your discovery of abstraction.

I’d say that I ‘found’ abstraction during my undergrad, and I’ve never really left that space. But my practice weaves in other directions, too. My life has changed rather radically in recent years, with me doing my Master’s at OCAD University in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design, and at the same time as doing that, I became pregnant. And then the pandemic happened.

Oh wow, ok. That’s a lot.

Yes! And part of my Master’s research was looking at the ancestral history of my matrilineal line, which took me into a traumatic history of exile and diaspora. I was processing a lot of heavy energies. Also, at this point in time, my husband and I moved out of Toronto’s downtown area.

Now, fast forwarding a few years, I find myself living in a new neighbourhood, having my MFA, and being a mother. I got into textiles and performance and video-making during my time at OCAD, and now I'm on the other side of all of these huge changes and asking myself, where's my practice going? How do I bring these histories together and move forward in a unified way.

A Map of Repairs, 2025. Oil, embroidered raw canvas, lace tablecloth, blouse remnant hand stitched on canvas (36 × 48 inches). Photography courtesy of Wall Space Gallery and the artist.

And how does that tie into the work you’ve been making recently?

The themes of repair and healing have always been huge for me, because I also have a background in the healing world as an acupuncturist. So, I think my practice has an element of repair work and bringing together different artistic and personal identities. For example, the embroidery aspect is drawn from my matrilineal line; they were all expert embroiderers and knitters and so on.

With my most recent pieces, I've been using needlework, embroidery, materials like lace and found objects, along with paints and inks. In a way, I’m dealing with a kind of detritus, like materials from my household—materials from being a mother. And I’m trying to integrate all these different identities and materials and ways of practicing into a whole.

I’d love to hear more about your experience of being a mother and an artist; how does one inform the other?

My moment of motherhood essentially coincided with me opening my creative practice up in unexpected directions, partly by necessity. Before I became pregnant, I was focused primarily on being a traditional oil painter, with some exceptions, and my studio practice was intense. I'd usually get into the studio in the afternoon and stay up to work all day for eight hours. I’d forget to eat! It was a cycle of stay up, be exhausted, sleep in, take my time; I wasn’t really accountable to anybody else. But, I've come to realize that painting is quite a volatile undertaking. It's very emotional. There’s highs and lows—one minute you’re feeling amazing, and the next you think you’ve just created the worst thing ever. It’s not very calm. And it's very physically demanding as well. A lot of the artists I know, myself included, get lost in the flow with no sense of time. It can be the best feeling ever, but once you become responsible for another person…. When you’re pregnant, you can’t be around toxic fumes and materials, and once I had my baby, time completely changed, of course.

I got into using knitting as a medium, because it’s something you can pick up and put down more easily. It's not messy—if you need to suddenly pick up your crying child, you don’t have to fuss with removing paint from your body or taking off a smock. And it also coincided with me getting more interested in my ancestry; as I mentioned, my grandmother and great-grandmother were amazing knitters. And my grandmother had this shawl that she had knit when I was growing up, and we called it The Magic Shawl. When you put it on, you would always feel better.

Nothing Went As Planned, 2025. Oil, embroidery thread on raw canvas and lace tablecloth hand stitched on canvas (24 x 30 inches). Photography courtesy of Wall Space Gallery and the artist.

Love that.

Yeah, and so I was trying to channel the kind of healing power, or magical power, of my grandmother's shawl. But then, it was also a case of me thinking about the artistry that went into these familial creations, and how could I use that medium to create paintings? It became a starting point of a whole methodology of making my ‘knitted paintings’ because I would knit swatches of colour while my daughter was napping, and then later on, assemble them into a composition. A cyclical way of working emerged that was much more nurturing to me, and my practice has evolved into me thinking about making art as something that doesn't have to be so intense and destructive to me in so many ways.

This relates to something I’ve been thinking about in learning more about your work, which is this spiritual and mystical component to it. And knitting has been described to me often as meditative; I’d love to hear more about your artistic practice and the rituals that help you move through it.

I have a corner in my studio for meditation, and where I read tarot cards. And I do journal writing in the morning. These things help to me anchor myself and get into a flow.

Ritual is also one of my main entry points into art making. I’ve been thinking a lot about my pieces as rituals in and of themselves. In making them, I was thinking about rites of passage having rituals associated with them; that's something I sort of idealize about ancient cultures—that they had rites of passage associated with life stages. It also occurred to me that for women, there are less recognized rites of passage for all the transitions that we go through. And it doesn't have to be about physically having a child; it could be around starting a project or ending a project. Just an overall understanding that things move in cycles.

I’m from a Jewish background, which is very steeped in ritual, and I've always just been really interested in the creativity of adopting rituals. I'm not from a religious family at all, but one thing that has really inspired me has been learning about my Sephardic ancestors who were living in the Ottoman Empire; the women lived a very cloistered life. They weren't really allowed to go out in public, and it was very domestic. And from this, they created their own world. They created their own folk medicine and spiritual practices. It was quite creative.

Threads of Memory is on until June 28th at Wall Space Gallery (Ottawa).