Press and Publicity
I’m so thrilled that Sequoia Miller and the Acquisitions Committee at the Gardiner Museum chose to acquire Building Blocks and have re-opened their newly designed first floor galleries with this work in the cases alongside so many amazing artists!!!!
In her mixed-media ceramics-based exhibition, Heidi McKenzie enshrines collective memory
By Simone Aziga
In her mixed-media ceramics-based exhibition, Heidi McKenzie enshrines collective memory
By Simone Aziga
Heidi McKenzie. Bangle, 2023. Stoneware, porcelain drybrush, glaze, silver acrylic pen. 18" x 26" x 8". Photo: Toni Hafkenshied.
Some stories are told and re-told, yet still not widely known as they should be. In her solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Heidi McKenzie aims to change that for Indo-Caribbean women, bringing centuries-old herstories into focus through a feminist lens. On view through August 30, McKenzie’s mixed-media, ceramic-based work is a record of the past and present lived experiences of Indo-Caribbean women from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries through to today. The Toronto-based artist is of mixed Indo-Trinidadian and Irish American heritage and explores themes of ancestry, race, migration, and decolonization through her practice.
Installation view of Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories. Gardiner Museum, 2023. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
As explained in the exhibition, 1833 was the official end of the legal trade of enslaved people in the British Empire. This shift resulted in the rise of indentured labour in the British colonies, particularly among Indian people. Of the estimated half-million Indians who migrated to present-day nations such as Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica and more with the promise of a brighter future, it is further estimated that 20 percent of these indentured labourers were women. These women, sometimes widowed and often seeking refuge from situations in their homeland, came to be referred to as “coolie belles”. As featured in Reclaimed, they were photographed in archival studio photography and postcards of time, left nameless with little personal details. The ornate jewellery they wore in these photographs signified status, cultural expression, and currency. The jewellery “became associated initially with the labouring classes and, more recently, with craft-based ties to matrilineal heritage.” Indentured labour continued in the Caribbean into the early 20th century until 1917.
Installation view of Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories. Gardiner Museum, 2023. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
With poetic sensitivity, Reclaimed connects these women through archival and family photographs to their descendants based in and around Toronto. Included and on view are “wall-mounted portraits on porcelain, lit from behind, depicting contemporary Indo-Caribbean women with portraits of a female ancestor; a collage of “coolie belles” on porcelain windowpanes, inspired by turn-of-the-century postcards and ephemera; and a series of abstract figurative sculptures that respond to the work, alongside select pieces of Indo-Indentureship silver jewellery.”
Heidi McKenzie. Coinage, 2023. stoneware, porcelain drybrush, steel stands. 56" x 16" x 2". Photo: Dale Roddick
“Following the ideas of cultural theorist Arielle Azoulay,” McKenzie explains in the exhibition, “my work engages the socio-political landscape of my Indo-Caribbean ancestors, purposefully shedding light on the under-represented stories of Indo-Caribbean women. The ‘coolie belle’ portraits were shot on glass plates by male colonial photographers and hand-processed. The postcards were exoticized and commodified for Western tourists at the turn of the last century, hardships erased. My process of transferring portraits to ceramic tile is an act of both reclamation and decolonization. The courage and defiance of these women uplifted their ‘new slave’ status, as they fought for better working conditions and increased wages. They wore their savings on their bodies, jewellery fashioned from their earnings. I also give voice through portraiture to us, we, the descendants of the ‘coolie women,’ to reclaim our herstories.”
Heidi McKenzie, Looking Back: No. 1, 2023. Ceramic pigment photo decals fired onto hand-rolled porcelain, cedar frame, hardware. 24" x 18" x 3". Photo: Dale Roddick.
The exhibition is also accompanied by a series of video herstories by contemporary Indo-Caribbean women: Lancelyn Rayman-Watters; Talisha Ramsaroop; Ramabai Espinet; Suzanne Narain; Kamala-Jean Gopie; Preeia Surajbali; LezLie Lee Kam; Shanta Saywack Maraj; Cheryl Khan and McKenzie.
Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories is on view in the lobby of the Gardiner Museum until August 30.
My exhibition, over a year in the making from concept to creation, opened at the Gardiner Museum on May 3rd, 2023. The video of the remarks by Chief Curator, Sequoia Miller and myself below:
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.
Read MoreDisrupting 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.
Read MoreLes 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.
Read More
Heidi McKenzie is a Canadian, and a finecraft ceramic artist of Indo-Trinidadian and Scots-Irish descent. During the last decade, McKenzie has been producing ceramic sculptures engaged with issues concerning systemic racial inequality. Through the lens of her familial encounter with indentureship, McKenzie encircles such specifics as the duality of bi-racial descent and the global consequences of colonialism. Her visual treatise urges the white community, to which I belong, to collectively recognize embedded racial privilege, and to work towards change. In the words of the american, Theastre Gates, whom McKenzie admires, “art and Protest are forms of political thought”.
Originally published in May/June 2021 issue No 3/21 of New Ceramics Monthly, pages 28-31 . .Copyright, New Ceramics, Berlin, Reprinted with permission. https://neue-keramik.de/wp/index.php/nc/current-issue/
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….
Read MoreOriginally published in February 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 40-43 . http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org . Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.
Read MoreSurrey, BC – Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce At Home and Elsewhere, an online panel discussion featuring artists who will speak about their work in the Gallery’s current exhibition, the themes of the exhibition, and also how the dynamics of the pandemic have shaped their practice—at home and in public. Their works variously address themes of diaspora, racism, communication, desire, pop culture, and more. The panel features a diverse roster of practicing contemporary artists: Sonny Assu, Heidi McKenzie, Helma Sawatzky, and Jan Wade. The conversation will be introduced and facilitated by Surrey Art Gallery Assistant Curator, Rhys Edwards.
This informal conversation was live streamed on November 14th, 2020 5pm EST.
In conversation with Devyani Saltzman @ AGO as Art in the Spotlight - re my work with image, archive, family, and indentured servitude in the Caribbean.
Read MoreJoin me as I walk you through my home and studio to see the work about my mixed Indo-Caribbean/Irish heritage.
Read More
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.
Read MoreThis monograph was written by Agnieszka Foltyn based on interviews she had with each of the artists, myself and Maya Foltyn. Circular Dimensions opens Friday, Feb.7th, 7-9pm. Artists’ Walk-through Sunday Feburary 23, 2pm.
"...The practices of Heidi McKenzie and Maya Foltyn touch and separate, intersect and cross over, flow in parallel and divide in separate directions. These are not linear trajectories but rather circular or cyclical meanderings, stimulated and affected by the machinations of society throughout time. They are dreams, thoughts, extensions of a willingness to understand or to come into contact with the unknown...."
Exhibition Dates
January 16 – 19, 2020
Come Up To My Room (CUTMR) is an annual 4-day alternative design exhibition created and produced by the Gladstone Hotel. It’s one of the only places where art and design intersect, with the historic hotel becoming a platform for site-specific installations. Visitors can explore, discover and engage in conversation with the artists. Different from our 37 permanent artist-designed hotel rooms, CUTMR presents temporary projects that occupy and alter spaces in dramatic, conceptual, or experimental ways.
“McKenzie describes much of her work as abstract portraiture, which allows her to reflect on a wide range of cultures and conditions in a ‘non-figurative, abstract, minimalist art that everyone can relate to.” McKenzie’s process is equally fluid, oscillating between hand-built sculpture and the slipcast or wheel-thrown functional wares currently sold at ceramic shops worldwide. “My work is really disparate, but I like the variety,” she says. “lots of potters have a signature look and they’re making that ten hours a day for twenty years. I’m not that person I like to switch things up constantly.”
— excerpt by Randi Bergman
“Even my pots.. they’re not just pots, they’re an expression of a story I have inside of me.” Heidi McKenzie”
“Heidi McKenzie, Est. 2012”
Toronto Makes: The Things We Love and the People Who Make Them
Randi Bergman, pp. 98-101.
This is a page spread in a lovely coffee table book that just came out!
For Sale on Indigo and Amazon and at Heidi’s gallerist, Guildworks in Prince Edward County.
Intern Josie Slaughter interviewed me about my motivation for the body of work that showed over the summer of 2019 at the Gardiner Shop: Family Matters.
Read the Interview
“[This work] is about telling the stories of who I am and where I came from. It’s about locating myself in a virtually monolithically white milieu as a child; about telling the stories of my parent’s struggles in the face of often violent racism; about really seeing who these people were in my past – both sets of great grandparents posturing to emulate a notion of ideal Victorianism – one as the colonizer, the other as the colonized. It’s all these things, and all of these things are about identity and culture, which is central to my sculpture practice.”
