Artist Talk: Heidi McKenzie
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
4:00 - 5:15 pm CT on Zoom
Event Recording
ASL Interpretation provided
For this talk, artist Heidi McKenzie will contextualize Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, her current solo exhibition installed at Gallery 1C03. Heidi will present works illustrative of her creative journey and how she came to work with the polarities of both modern minimalism in abstraction, and photographic image on porcelain, in order to tell the little-known histories of her ancestors, both Indo-Caribbean and post-Famine Irish-Canadian immigrants. Heidi works with archive, memory, race, image and gives voice to story through the use of augmented reality and video stories that are triggered through the ceramic sculptural installations. Following the talk, there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.
This event will be moderated by Associate Professor and Chair of the University of Winnipeg's Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Dr. Sharanpal Ruprai and is sponsored by the Margaret Laurence Endowment Fund Community Grants.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic and installation artist based in Toronto. Heidi completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She 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, Oceania and North America. The recipient of numerous grants, Heidi has created work in Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China and Indonesia. Her art has been collected by the Royal Ontario Museum, Global Affairs Canada, and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, among others. Heidi curated Decolonizing Clay at the Australian Ceramics Triennale in 2019 and participated in the World Indian Diaspora Congress in Trinidad in 2020. She was inducted into the International Academy of Ceramics in 2022. She serves as a volunteer board member with NCECA, the National Council for the Education of the Ceramic Arts. Heidi’s installation, Division, which highlights the division of class between plantation owner and worker in the Caribbean, was invited to tour in the US alongside works by Ai Wei Wei, Theaster Gates, Simone Leigh, and Magdolene Odundo in the exhibition Underneath Everything. Heidi’s solo exhibition Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories – exploring the little-known migrant and labour histories of Indo-Caribbean indentureship through a feminist lens -- was first shown at the Gardiner Museum in 2023 and is remounted in Winnipeg at Gallery 1C03 in 2025. She presented Girmitya HerStories at the 2024 Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi – bringing the Indo-Caribbean diaspora “home.”
Dr. Sharanpal Ruprai is a writer and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Ruprai’s début poetry collection, Seva, was shortlisted for the Stephen G. Stephansson Award for Poetry by the Alberta Literary Awards in 2015, and her most recent collection, Pressure Cooker Love Bomb, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2020 Annual Lambda Literary Awards. As an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, her research and teaching interests include: indigenous and critical race feminism, religious and cultural studies and artistic practice. Currently, Ruprai is working on a collection of essays entitled Who You Calling a Kaur/Princess? By juxtaposing novels, plays, poetry collections, and films, the book explores issues such as religion, gender violence, and identity, within the specific context of the Canadian South Asian women’s experience.