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When Heidi McKenzie was 9 or 10 years old, a school assignment required her to write a message-in-a-bottle account of herself. Fortunately, the message was not put into the Bay of Fundy near McKenzie’s home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. She kept it. Chapter 14, “My Plans for the Future,” begins with text and a drawing that portend a career in ceramics.
Originally published in March 2022 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 33-37 . http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org . Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.
Disrupting the Canon - with Natalia Arbalaez, Magdolene Dykstra and Habiba El-Sayed. Heidi McKenzie’s work illuminated the little-know history of the indo-caribbean indentured workers from the 19th and early 20th century.
Les organisateurs de la BILP ont conçu une programmation dont les divers éléments prennent place dans les lieux patrimoniaux de Deschambault-Grondines, du 19 juin au 3 octobre 2021.
Le Vieux presbytère de Deschambault et le Moulin de La Chevrotière accueillent l’exposition Revirements qui réunit les oeuvres de 20 artistes professionnels du Québec, du Canada, de la Belgique, des États-Unis de la France, de la Lituanie, des Pays-Bas, de la Pologne et du Portugal.
The pervaseiveness of mainstream White Racial superiority in North America today exists in the wake of the continent’s history: the colonization and genocide of its Indigenous peoples; slavery and its aftermath; ad the subsequent exclusionary Whites only migration policies imposed by European settlers and lwmakers until the mid to late 1960s….
Originally published in February 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 40-43 . http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org . Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.
In conversation with Devyani Saltzman @ AGO as Art in the Spotlight - re my work with image, archive, family, and indentured servitude in the Caribbean.
Join me as I walk you through my home and studio to see the work about my mixed Indo-Caribbean/Irish heritage.
Heidi McKenzie challenges dominant power centers by confronting racial marginalization and the inextricable joining of migration and colonialism of her family’s past. McKenzie began her ceramics career in 2010, engaging with abstract self-portraiture, throwing and altering bands of agateware on the wheel. Participating in Project Network at Guldagergaard Ceramic Research Center in Denmark allowed her to explore multiple-part mold making, as well as photographic image transfer. At first, McKenzie used imagery to more viscerally express the human body, her own body. In 2016, following the death of her father, McKenzie began to investigate functional pottery. Illness prevented her from working on the wheel, so she developed a series of slip cast porcelain neriage pots. Neriage technique relies on laminating different colored clays together, allowing them to mix into a swirling blend of the clays, referencing her mixed-race Indo-Trinidadian/Irish-American identity.