Heidi McKenzie

Tuckers Pottery Supplies Inc Clay supply grant

Heidi McKenzie is a Toronto-based ceramic artist. She apprenticed under Mansimran Singh (Leach student) in India in 2009, and Mitsuo Shoji in Australia in 2017. She completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Heidi's work has been shown internationally in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Indonesia, Hungary, Italy, Romania and the United States. 

Her studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, she captures self, an individual, or a culture. She began incorporating photographic imagery on clay in 2014 to viscerally depict the fragmentation of body, and moved on to explore image as archive. Her work is informed by the everyday lived experience of her mixed heritage. In the 19th century, Heidi's ancestors travelled from Ireland to Canada and India to the Caribbean in hopes of a better life. In the 1950s,her parents married at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in several American states and extremely uncommon in both Canada and the U.S. She grew up on the East coast of Canada, on of a handful of brown faces in a sea of white, at the corners of “Canadianness.” Holding space and making place for people of color matters. Telling her family’s stories matter.

https://www.heidimckenzie.ca

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