Margaret Glew: Loose Threads

Yorkminster Park Gallery

Untitled, 2025, appliqued, hand stitched, quilted textile, 55″ x 47″

Margaret Glew: Loose Threads

September 12 – October 29, 2026
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 20, 2–4pm
Artist in conversation with John Gagné: Wednesday, October 14, 7pm
Yorkminster Park Gallery, Toronto

Yorkminster Park Gallery is pleased to present Loose Threads, a solo exhibition featuring the quilted textile works of Canadian artist Margaret Glew. The exhibition explores themes of memory, material history, and the passage of time.

Glew makes hand-stitched, quilted textiles out of used clothing. Cloth is inherently intimate; the repurposed clothing carries the ghosts of prior wearers, embodying lived history and human presence. Embedded within many of these quilts are small, discrete windows of unbleached cotton featuring intuitive drawings. If the clothing represents collective history, these raw cotton fragments function as quiet interior landscapes—spaces where subconscious marks offer a direct, unmediated record of the artist’s presence.

The raw edges signal vulnerability, impermanence, and a refusal to neatly package or hide the fraying realities of life. Hand-stitching functions as a visible record of time, presence, and human touch, binding disparate fragments into a collective narrative.

Stripped of complex colour palettes, the exhibition relies on a minimalist language of black and white, punctuated by accents of red. This restricted palette serves to focus attention on rich textures, frayed edges, and rhythmic lines of stitching. Ultimately, Loose Threads is a stark testament to what endures—a quiet space where the fragments of the past are are rewoven into a landscape of collective memory.

Untitled, 2023, appliqued, hand stitched, quilted textile, 26″ x 26″

Artist in Conversation with John Gagné
Wednesday, October 14, 7pm

John Gagné is the owner and director of Gagné Contemporary and Gagné Contemporary Projects. Gagné Contemporary emerged out of New York City’s lower east side in 2016, curating shows in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and working privately with art collectors. In 2020 the gallery moved to Toronto, Canada. Now with two galleries in the city, we work with emerging and established artists, and continue to work privately with art collectors

About the Artist

Margaret Glew is a Toronto-based painter and textile artist with a 40-year exhibition history across Canada and the United States; Her intuitive, process-driven abstracts appear in notable public and corporate collections, including the City of Toronto Art Collection, and the Richmond Hill Public Library. Recent solo projects include Burning Fire Blues—part of the Collective City Gallery Project—and Recent Work at The Modern Toronto, as well as a featured textile exhibition at the 2023 World of Threads Festival.

Untitled, 2024, appliqued, hand stitched quilted textile, 37″ x 40″

About Yorkminster Park Gallery

Located in the foyer of Yorkminster Park Centre in midtown Toronto, Yorkminster Park Gallery presents exhibitions by professional Canadian artists working across a broad range of media and styles. Selected from across the spectrum of contemporary artistic practice—from abstraction to representation—these works are chosen for their spiritual content and their capacity to speak to the human spirit, fostering reflection, dialogue, and discovery.

The Gallery seeks to broaden appreciation for the visual arts by presenting diverse artistic practices, materials, themes, and perspectives within a welcoming community setting.

The exhibition season runs from September through July and features five to six exhibitions annually, each presenting up to twenty works. While Yorkminster Park Gallery is not a commercial gallery, all exhibited works are available for purchase directly from the artist.

The Gallery welcomes visitors from the congregation, the local community, and beyond.

Yorkminster Park Gallery
1585 Yonge Street
Toronto, ON M4T 1Z9
www.yorkminsterpark.com/create/ypbc-gallery.php
ypgallery@yorkminsterpark.com
416-922-1167
Instagram @yorkminsterparkgallery

Gallery Hours
Saturday, Noon – 3pm
Monday to Friday (by appointment), 10am – 3pm

Accessibility
Yorkminster Park Gallery is fully accessible.

Margaret Glew
www.margaretglew.com
margaret.l.glew@gmail.com
Instagram @margaret_glew
Facebook @margaret.glew