Julie Gladstone

Julie Gladstone is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto whose work explores the intersections of memory, embodiment, healing, time, and motherhood. Working across abstract painting, textiles, and installation, she maps emotional and ancestral landscapes through layered mark-making, stitching, and the integration of repurposed materials. Her practice is deeply influenced by her background in acupuncture and somatic healing, merging contemporary abstraction with feminist and ancestral craft traditions.

A central focus of her work is navigating the dual identity of artist and mother—honoring both roles as vital, creative, and deeply interconnected. Through the use of domestic fragments such as baby blankets, embroidery, toys, and plastics, she reclaims the gestures and materials of caregiving as sacred and artistically generative. Her pieces become acts of remembrance and resistance: visual rituals that give form to the invisible labor, ruptures, and redefinitions that motherhood often brings.

Themes of disruption and repair are woven throughout her practice. The recurring use of grids—evoking calendars, urban planning, and systems of control—mirrors the structure that modern life and parenting impose. Yet these grids are intentionally broken or pierced by intuitive, stitched forms, reflecting how personal and maternal timelines rarely align with external expectations.

Born and raised in a creative family in Toronto, Gladstone grew up surrounded by art, music, and intellectual inquiry. Her early exposure to archaeology, travel, and ancestral storytelling seeded a lifelong interest in memory, place, and time. Her great uncle was Canadian modernist Gerald Gladstone; her grandfather, an archaeologist of ancient civilizations; and her matrilineal line carried forward traditions of Judeo-Spanish embroidery and song.

In addition to her visual art practice, she explores sound and memory through music. Her recent EP Life Line, released on Sonic Peach Music, draws on Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) musical traditions and her Sephardic heritage, blending ancestral melodies with contemporary composition as another way of expressing intergenerational memory and healing.

She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD University in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design. She has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at the Museum of Jewish Montreal and Casino Obrero in Spain, and her work has been acquired by public and private collections including the Béjar Textile Museum, the City of Edmonton, and Michael Garron Hospital. In 2025, she was artist-in-residence at the Gladstone Hotel, supported by the Toronto Arts Council, where she continued her exploration of motherhood as both subject and material.

Gladstone is represented by OXH Gallery in Tampa, Florida, and Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa, and is a member of the Spanish feminist collective Entre Sábanas. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic Magazine, The Guardian, CBC Arts, ArtToronto, Canadian Art, and ArtNet. She has received grants from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and has presented her research at the Museum of Motherhood and other conferences.

At its core, her practice is both personal and political—part map, part excavation. Stitching becomes a visual and physical act of repair, bridging the roles of artist, mother, and healer. Through this tactile and sonic language, she invites viewers and listeners into a layered experience of time, care, identity, and transformation.

Notable exhibitions have included:

The Art Museum at University of Toronto (2024)

My Heart at Night at Emily Harding Gallery (2024)

Receptacle at OXH Gallery, Tampa Florida, (2024)

Lullabies in Exile at Redeemer University (2022)

R I V E R V A R I A T I O N S at Wall Space Gallery (2021)

Return to the Fortress at the Museum of Jewish Montreal (2020)

La Fuente de Los Deseos at David Melul Museum Judio in Béjar, Spain (2019)

Surface Tension at the Artport Gallery as part of Design TO (2018)

The Department of Canadian Heritage (2018)

Infinity Pool at Navillus Gallery (2015)

The Sky is Falling at Walnut Contemporary (2013)

Metaphsyical Cartography at Walnut Contemporary (2012).

Gladstone’s work has been featured by Art Toronto, CBC Arts, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic Magazine, Arts Coast Magazine, Toronto Guardian, Toronto Life, the Canadian Jewish News among others. Her studio research has been funded by Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Notable residencies include SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland, and Artscape Gibraltar point on Toronto Island. As well as a self directed residency on Haida Gwaii where she also worked at the Haida Heritage Centre to help archive the rare book collection.

Gladstone gratefully acknowledges the support of the Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council for their ongoing support of her practice.

As a Canadian abstract landscape painter, much of Gladstone’s past work has focused on the changing faces of the urban landscape, depicting water in it's myriad of forms and the impact of weather on the public imagination through a re-imagined sublime aesthetic. Whereas in previous series, the artists vocabulary of mark making has arisen from observation of the urban landscape, and weather patterns, now, mark-making like scratching, building up and removing layers to create a textured, archeological surface, suggests the alchemical process of healing and the sticky quality of certain mental and emotional states.

This process of internal inquiry has resulted in “My Heart at Night” and the emergence of the artists new aesthetic of the “Internal Sublime”, operating somewhere at the intersections of abstract expressionism, romantic landscape painting, art nouveau, intimism and self-portraiture. In her latest series, the paintings underscore a new fluidity between the inner and outer landscape, and a more intimate and introspective mood that leads to a contemplation of the metaphysical and the cosmic.

More about Julie Gladstone's Painting practice

My Heart at Night is a series of new paintings and drawings by Canadian artist Julie Gladstone that reprises her ongoing investigation into impermanence of the landscape using a more introspective approach she refers to as “internal sublime” . With her signature contemporary sublime aesthetic, expressionistic mark making and textured surfaces, the artist has turned her gaze inwards, away from the clouds so as to map and track her internal states during moments of meditation. Using a research methodology grounded in regular floatation therapy (or sensory deprivation), this series takes a “plein air” approach to the artists inner world.

Seeking healing and respite from the barrage of digital imagery and information coming through her phone, these paintings are the result of the artists inquiry into the aesthetics of sensory augementation, and regular immersion in a float tank so as to observe and try to depict awareness itself: her intuition, nervous system responses and cosmic consciousness. Incorporating visual imagery reminiscent of distant galaxies the aesthetics seem to echo those cosmic images being received from the James Webb telescope; intertwining observations of inner space, fluctuating emotional spaces with science fiction concepts like time portals from Start Trek voyageur and Isaac Asimov novels all finding their way into the visual mix.

Initially inspired by the series of "Bather" paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Gladstone seeks to reclaim and depict a first person feminine experience of the bather and the goals of the intimism movement. The intimism movement is notable in that the artists emphasized texture, an exaggerated palette, and merged figure and ground, utilizing domestic narratives or a focus on the mundane. Defined by art critic Camille Marcoux as “a revelation of the soul through the things painted, the magnetic suggestion of what lies behind them through the description of the outer appearance”.

In this series Gladstone uses these techniques to represent restorative experiences from the first person perspective; rather than as a subject of voyeurism, these works become about the experience of the interior life of a female artist, and the fluidity between the mundane and the sublime.

With an emphasis on a nocturnal mood, and an expressive, contrasting neon palette, My Heart at Night, re-imagines the spiritual palette to consider forms of rest and renewal.

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