Heidi McKenzie

Heidi McKenzie (born 1968) is a Canadian ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Her work combines ceramics with photography, digital media, and archival material, and explores themes of ancestry, race, migration, and colonization. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Early life and education McKenzie was born in 1968 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, to an Indo-Trinidadian father and a white American mother of Canadian and Irish descent. Her father, Joseph Addison McKenzie, was a biologist, academic, and scientist who immigrated to Canada in 1953 and was later appointed the Dean of Science at the University of New Brunswick in 1995. The couple married in the late 1950s, a period when interracial marriage faced significant legal restrictions in several American states and social barriers in Canada. McKenzie works across porcelain and earthenware, utilizing wheel-throwing, hand-building, and slab-throwing techniques.

Her work has been the subject of coverage in ceramics and arts publications. In 2021, Ceramics Monthly published a feature on McKenzie's studio practice and artistic development.

Her upbringing and identity serve as central subjects in her practice, which frequently investigates themes of migration, colonization, historical archives, and memory. She notes wanting to trouble the notion of mixed race identity and Caribbean identity through her work, describing her functional and sculptural pieces alike as expressions of internal storytelling. In 2023, she presented the solo exhibition Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Reviewing the exhibition in Foyer, Simone Aziga wrote that McKenzie's mixed-media, ceramic-based work centered the histories and lived experiences of Indo-Caribbean women through a feminist lens.

In a 2024 profile in Brown Girl Magazine, Savita Prasad described McKenzie's work as an effort to recover and visualize Indo-Caribbean histories, particularly the stories of women obscured by colonial archives.

Works and themes McKenzie draws from her personal genealogy to address the broader histories of the South Asian diaspora. A pivotal point of inquiry in her work is the history of her great-great-grandmother, Roonia, who migrated from Calcutta to Guyana in 1865 as an indentured laborer. She recalls the journey mirroring the spirit of her father's own immigration from Trinidad to Canada.

In her 2021 work Illuminated, McKenzie utilized LED ceramic lightboxes and porcelain tiles to display historical portraits of "coolie belles"—indentured South Asian women whose photographs were heavily commodified by the 19th-century Caribbean tourist industry. By embedding an archival image of Roonia into the installation, McKenzie locates her own position within the diasporic narrative.

Family history and the lived experiences of racialization in Canada are central to McKenzie's artistic inquiries, particularly through the lens of her father's life as a migrant. Her work frequently unearths the systemic racism and resistance embedded in mid-century Canadian history. In her exhibition Brick by Brick: Absence vs. Presence at the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, Alberta, McKenzie drew from histories of her father’s employment working the Stelco brick furnaces in Hamilton, Ontario, during the 1950s; there, workers of African and South Asian descent were routinely assigned to the hottest sections of the facility due to racialized misconceptions that darker-skinned individuals possessed a higher heat tolerance. Utilizing archival photographs, digital collage, and structural steel installations, the exhibition explored themes of Afro-Asian solidarity, historical memory, and generational trauma. The exhibition featured Boxed In (2016), a series of slip-cast polyhedron blocks bearing photographic fragments of her own body, which she juxtaposed against Body Interrupted (2016)—an intimate photographic study of her father’s body captured six months prior to his death, intended to parallel their shared physical struggles. 2025: What We Inherit (Two-person exhibition with Natalie Hunter), Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton, Ontario 2023: Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario 2023: tRaces (Two-person exhibition with Jeannie Mah), Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan 2022: Brick by Brick: Absence vs. Presence, Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat, Alberta 2019: Whatever Will Be, Medalta Potteries, Medicine Hat, Alberta 2017: Spaces Within: The Oz Collection, Newington Armory, Sydney, Australia 2015: China Unbound, David Kaye Gallery, Toronto, Ontario 2013: Balancing Act, Gaya Ceramic Arts Center, Sayan, Bali, Indonesia

Select group exhibitions 2026: Linen Biennale Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland 2024: Girmitya HerStories, Indian International Ceramics Triennale, New Delhi, India 2024: Underneath Everything (Touring), Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, United States 2024: Breakthrough – Fusion's 50th Anniversary Exhibition, Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario 2023: #CripClay, NCECA Concurrent Exhibition, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States 2021: Cladogram – KMA International Juried Exhibition, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York, United States 2020: Come Up to My Room, DesignTO, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, Ontario 2019: 4th Cluj International Ceramics Biennial, Cluj, Romania 2019: Craft Forms – 25th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft, Wayne Art Center, Wayne, Pennsylvania, United States 2019: Decolonizing Clay, Australian Ceramics Triennale, Tasmania, Australia 2017: 3rd Cluj International Ceramics Biennial, Cluj, Romania 2014: 4th International Triennial of Silicate Arts, Kecskemét, Hungary 2014: Transcending Materials – Potters Council Juried Exhibition, NCECA, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States 2012: Toronto International Art Fair, Toronto, Ontario (SAVAC booth)

Selected artworks

Year Title Medium Dimensions / Notes Collection / Repository 2025 Blueprints Screenprinted slips, ceramic decals, and rebar Variable dimensions; Conceptual multi-media installation exploring the physical impact of labor and oil refinery production on her father's health. Artist's collection (Exhibited at Workers Arts & Heritage Centre) 2021 Linenopolis Photographic image transfers on porcelain Variable dimensions; Mixed-media installation utilizing tiles shaped to mimic historical Jacquard loom punch cards to explore 19th-century industrial labor and the textile history of Belfast. Artist's collection (Exhibited at Biennale internationale du lin de Portneuf) 2019-2022 Building Blocks Stoneware and iron oxide photographic decals 36 × 18 × 18 in; Features 26 hand-built stoneware blocks balancing maternal and paternal ancestral imagery. Gardiner Museum (Permanent Collection) 2021 Illuminated Porcelain tiles, ceramic decals, LED lightboxes Variable dimensions; Depicts archival portraits of Indo-Caribbean indentured women ("coolie belles"). Royal Ontario Museum (Permanent Collection) 2021 First Wave Sculptural porcelain installation Variable dimensions; A structural recreation of the Fatel Razack, the first ship to transport South Asian migrants to Trinidad. Royal Ontario Museum (Permanent Collection) 2020 Division Porcelain, iron oxide decals, plexiglass, acrylic, wood, and metal hinges 165 × 84 × 3.75 cm; A formal partition screen exploring systemic and colonial racial inequities. Exhibited at Des Moines Art Center 2019 House of Cards Porcelain substrates and iron oxide photographic decals 26 porcelain substrate "cards", 4.5 × 6.5 in each; Stacking arrangement depicting her great-great-grandmother Roonia. Private collection 2017 Postmarked Slip-cast porcelain, ceramic decals, and acrylic 21 blocks, 15 × 15 × 15 cm each; 14-sided tetradecahedrons featuring family archives and iconic Canadian imagery. Global Affairs Canada (Acquired 2019) 2016 Boxed In (formerly Moving Forward) Slip-cast porcelain and iron oxide decals 15 irregular cubes, 11 × 11 × 11 cm each; Autobiographical self-portraiture depicting fragments of the artist's body. Artist's collection 2016 Body Interrupted Earthenware, ceramic decals, aircraft cable, and raku-fired rings 150 × 150 × 3 cm mobile strands; Abstract portrait of the physical frailty and resilience of her late father. Permanent installation variable

Selected bibliography In addition to her visual art practice, McKenzie works actively as a ceramic scholar, art critic, and arts journalist. Her written work addresses topics in contemporary craft history, mixed-race identity, and the material cultures of the South Asian diaspora.

Books and academic chapters 2022: "Liminal Lives: Documenting the Inheritance of Post-Indentureship from the Caribbean to Canada" – Indenture Papers, Trinidad. 2022: "Grace Nickel’s Eruptions: Regrowth and Reimagining" – In Eruptions, Grace Nickel, University of Winnipeg Press. 2022: Finalist, RBC Emerging Ceramic Artist Award (Shantz Award), Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery 2020: NCECA Helene Zucker Seeman Curatorial, Research, and Critical Writing Fellowship for Women 2019: Craft Ontario Award (Tucker’s Pottery Supplies House) 2017: Named an "Emerging Artist" by Ceramics Monthly magazine 2017: Craft Ontario Award

She is fluent in French.