About Heidi McKenzie

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. Heidi completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. She is informed by her mixed-race Indo-Trinidadian/Irish-American heritage. Heidi uses ceramics, photography, digital media, and archival image to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration and colonization, as well as themes of body and healing. Heidi has exhibited internationally in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, Oceana and the US. The recipient of numerous grants, Heidi has created in Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China and Indonesia. Her work has been collected by the ROM, Global Affairs Canada, the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, and Surrey Art Museum. Heidi’s installation, Division, was invited to tour in the US alongside works of Ai Wei Wei, Theaster Gates, and Magdolene Odundo (Underneath Everything). Her solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (spring 2023) explores the little-known histories of Indo-Caribbean indentureship through a feminist lens. Heidi was invited to the juried feature exhibition, Common Ground, at the Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi, 2024, to present Girmitya HerStories – bringing the Indo-Caribbean diaspora “home.”

Artist Statement

My studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, I capture self, an individual, or a culture. I began incorporating photographic imagery on clay in 2014 to viscerally depict the fragmentation of body, and have moved on to explore image as archive. This body of work speaks to my personal histories through photographic imagery coupled with abstract representation. My work is informed by the everyday lived experience of my mixed heritage. In the 19thcentury, my ancestors traveled from Ireland to Canada and India to the Caribbean in hopes of a better life. In the 1950s, my parents married at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in several American states and extremely uncommon in both Canada and the U.S. I grew up on the East coast of Canada, one of a handful of brown faces in a sea of white, at the corners of “Canadianness.” Holding space and making place for people of color matters. Telling my family’s stories matter.

— Heidi McKenzie, 2022

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