About Heidi McKenzie

Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. Heidi completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Heidi is informed by her mixed-race Indo-Trinidadian/Irish-American heritage. Heidi uses ceramics, photography, digital media, and archive to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration and colonization, as well as body and healing. Heidi has exhibited internationally in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, Oceana and North America. The recipient of numerous grants, Heidi has created in Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China and Indonesia. Her work has been collected by the Royal Ontario Museum, Global Affairs Canada, the Gardiner Museum, and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery.

Heidi’s solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (spring 2023) explores the little-known migrant and labour histories of Indo-Caribbean indentureship through a feminist lens. Heidi presented Girmitya HerStories at the 2024 Indian International Ceramics Triennale in Delhi – bringing the Indo-Caribbean diaspora “home.” Her recent fall 2025 solo exhibition, The Forgotten Man forefronts her father’s involvement in Canada’s largest student race protests for Black rights. Heidi was invited to China for the International Academy of Ceramic Artists’ pre-conference artist residency and exhibit Innovation & Inheritance this spring/summer. 

Heidi curated ‘Decolonizing Clay’ at the Australian Ceramics Triennale, 2019. She was inducted into the International Academy of Ceramics in 2022. Heidi’s installation, Division, was invited to tour in the US alongside works of Ai Wei Wei, Theaster Gates, Simone Leigh, and Magdolene Odundo. 

Artist Statement

I grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the daughter of an Indo-Trinidadian immigrant who married an Irish-American woman—a brown face in a sea of white. My lived experience propelled me to engage with issues of race, identity, and representation. I work with archive, memory and ancestry. I often integrate muti-media, video, augmented reality and soundscape to enhance the narrative story-telling in my installations. I began working with sepia-toned, iron-oxide rich archival photography on ceramic, rendering my father’s life and telling the stories of his ancestors. I persisted in using ceramic material in the production process, fusing coloured ceramic pigments onto hand-rolled porcelain. 

Following the ideas of cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay, my work engages the socio-political landscape of my ancestors, purposefully shedding light on the under- represented stories of migrant and/or racialized peoples. I have recently begun to reach beyond the ceramics medium, incorporating fabrics, digital collage, cyanotype, mylar, and steel structures into my work. My 2025 solo exhibition in Montreal responds to my destabilization upon learning of my father’s involvement in Canada’s largest race riots, “The Forgotten Man – Reckoning The Sir George Williams Protests, 1969. I am also exploring my mother’s Irish ancestors, the farmers from Northern Ireland who worked the flax fields and came to Canada to work the land post Famine. This spring I was invited to create in Longquan Wangou, China, supported by the International Academy of Ceramic Artists, and will be showing my work, Kali Pani Crossings, a version of which I showed at the Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi, 2024 – bringing the voices of Indo-indentured women ‘home.’

My work asks the viewer to consider, acknowledge, understand, and transmute in our times the historical barriers of class, race and colonialization. Holding space and making place for people of colour matters. Telling my family’s stories matters. 

— Heidi McKenzie, 2026

Follow Me on Instagram