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. Her mother, Ellen Joyce McMenemy, was a music teacher from a working-class farming family in Ohio. 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. Raised in a musical household, McKenzie became an adept classical pianist and won regional competitions as a child. In 1973, her family relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, for one year; McKenzie has noted that this period was marked by early experiences of racial "othering" and isolation.
McKenzie pursued her initial post-secondary education in arts policy, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Administration from the University of Toronto in 1991, followed by a Master of Arts in Comparative Cultural Policy from the University of Warwick in 1994. McKenzie studied ceramics at Sheridan College and later completed an MFA at OCAD University in 2014.
Ceramic training and career McKenzie's transition into a full-time studio art practice was catalyzed by a series of international apprenticeships and formal ceramic education. In 2009, she traveled to her father's ancestral home in India to apprentice under Mansimran Singh at Andretta Pottery in the Himachal Pradesh state; because Singh had been a direct student of British studio potter Bernard Leach, the experience deeply grounded McKenzie's early technical practice. McKenzie works across porcelain and earthenware, utilizing wheel-throwing, hand-building, and slab-throwing techniques.
She subsequently returned to Canada to pursue formal studio training, completing a craft and ceramics diploma at Sheridan College in 2012. During this period, she studied under Canadian ceramicists Les Manning and Winn Burke, the latter of whom she credits with shifting her focus toward world cultures. McKenzie then earned a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University in 2014. Following her graduation, she established a full-time artistic practice.
In 2017, she further expanded her technical scale and reduction-firing techniques through a three-month master apprenticeship with Mitsuo Shoji in Sydney, Australia. Also in late 2017, supported by a research grant from the Canadian Consular Office, she traveled to the Northern Territory to spend time collaborating and conducting studio demonstrations with the Indigenous women of the Hermannsburg Potters collective near Alice Springs. She cites this experience as highly influential for the importance of telling her own family story through ceramics.
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. In 2022, CKUA featured her exhibition Brick by Brick: Absence vs. Presence, describing it as a multimedia exhibition incorporating historical and contemporary photographs, ceramic sculpture, and other audiovisual elements.
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. In the same year, the Royal Ontario Museum acquired her pieces Iluminated and First Wave for its permanent collection and published a feature interview with her in the ROM Magazine. In 2025, her piece Building Blocks was included in the permanent collection of the Gardiner Museum.
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. Roonia’s history is further explored in House of Cards (2019), a series consisting of iron-oxide photographic decals transferred onto porcelain substrates; the fragile structural arrangement of the pieces mirrors the precarity of historical memory. McKenzie also addresses the physical realities of transatlantic migration in First Wave (2021), a sculptural recreation of the Fatel Razack (or Futtle Rozack), the ship that transported the first 225 Indian indentured laborers from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1845. These themes culminated in her 2023 solo exhibition, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Guided by the theories of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, the installation subverts colonial-era postcards that historically commodified nameless indentured women. By transferring archival images and contemporary photos of their descendants onto ceramic tiles, McKenzie honors the historical defiance and matrilineal legacy of Indo-Caribbean women.
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.
McKenzie later expanded this investigation into Canadian civil rights history by researching her father's presence at Sir George Williams University during the historic 1969 Sir George Williams riot—the largest student-led race protest in Canadian history. Her 2025–2026 solo multimedia exhibition, The Forgotten Man – Reckoning The Sir George Williams Protests, 1969, at the Centre Céramique Bonsecours in Montreal, served as a personal reckoning with her discovery that her father had supported the white biology professor whose academic discrimination catalyzed the uprising. Utilizing archival photographs, digital collage, and structural steel installations, the exhibition explored themes of Afro-Asian solidarity, historical memory, and generational trauma. To articulate the unstable nature of these narratives, McKenzie frequently turns to geometric structural precarity. In Postmarked (2017), she explored notions of "Canadiana" and her mixed-race upbringing by firing family archival photos onto unstable, 14-sided tetradecahedrons. Regarding these conceptual motivations, McKenzie has stated: "I want to tell the stories of my father’s family and of my life in order to add the under-represented voice of the mixed-race Indo-Caribbean to the canon."
Additionally, McKenzie has translated her personal experiences with illness, the body, and chronic pain into her work. During a 2014 residency at Guldagergaard in Denmark, she learned techniques for transferring photographic imagery onto clay, which she later deployed when health complications temporarily prevented her from wheel-throwing. This period informed her 2019 exhibition Family Matters at the Gardiner Museum. The body of work served as a means of locating her childhood identity within a virtually monolithically white milieu, while visually documenting her parents' historic endurance against instances of violent racism. 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. Through these archival transfers, McKenzie also explored the irony of her ancestral lineages, noting how both sets of her great-grandparents in Ohio and Trinidad utilized a curated posturing of "ideal Victorianism" in historical portraits as a structural shield against colonial and racialized stratification.
Exhibitions
Select solo exhibitions 2025–2026: The Forgotten Man – Reckoning The Sir George Williams Protests, 1969, Centre Céramique Bonsecours, Montreal, Quebec 2025: Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (Touring), Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg, Manitoba 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