BIO Heidi McKenzie is a Toronto-based ceramic artist. Heidi apprenticed in her father’s ancestral home at the foothills of the Himalayas with India’s foremost studio potter, Mini Singh (a student of Bernard Leach). Heidi returned to Canada and completed her Diploma at Sheridan College in 2012 and subsequently her MFA in Curatorial Practice and Art Criticism at OCADU in 2014. In 2011 Heidi received the Emerging Artist Award at Toronto Artists Project, and in 2012 exhibited at the Toronto International Art Fair. In 2013, Heidi was funded by the Ontario Arts Council to create in Jingdezhen, China and in Bali, Indonesia. In 2014 Heidi completed a residency at Guldagergaard International Centre for Ceramic Research. In 2017 Heidi received OAC funding to work in Sydney Australia, to apprentice with Master Mitsuo Shoji and expand her sculptural vocabulary. The Canada Council awarded Heidi a grant to explore and create “building big” at Medalta, Shaw International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics in 2019. Heidi has exhibited nationally and internationally, including biennales and Romania, Hungary, Australia and at NCECA (Milwaukee, Portland). She is recipient of a 2017 Craft Ontario Award, and Best in Show Ontario Artists Association Biennial Award, and 2019 Canada Council Explore and Create Visual Artist Grant, Toronto Arts Council Grant to Mid-Career Artists, and 2019 Craft Ontario Award. Work from her recent solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum Shop was acquired by Global Affairs Canada, and has been juried into Craft Forms in Pennsylvania by Smithsonian Curator, Jane Milosch. Heidi is the inaugural recipient of the 2020 NCECA Helene Zucker Seeman Curatorial, Research, and Critical Writing Fellowship for Women. In 2021, Heidi received Best in Show at the Toronto Potter’s Biennial at the Gardiner Museum. Heidi’s work seeks to reinvigorate modernism through abstraction and engages issues of race, identity, belonging, as well as body and healing. She is an active arts journalist and ceramic arts reviewer. Heidi serves as a Board Director for the National Council on Education of the Ceramic Arts. Artist Statement My studio practice engages issues of identity and belonging. Through abstract portraiture, I capture self, an individual, or a culture. I began incorporating photographic imagery on clay in 2014 to viscerally depict the fragmentation of body, and have moved on to explore image as archive. This body of work speaks to my personal histories through photographic imagery coupled with abstract representation. My work is informed by the everyday lived experience of my mixed heritage. In the 19thcentury, my ancestors traveled from Ireland to Canada and India to the Caribbean in hopes of a better life. In the 1950s, my parents married at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in several American states and extremely uncommon in both Canada and the U.S. I 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 my family’s stories matter.