Toronto-based artist Heidi McKenzie reveals the little-known histories of Indo-Indentureship

Toronto—Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories, part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, opens at the Gardiner Museum on May 4. The exhibition highlights the complex, longstanding, and often unpredictable interplay between ceramics and photography.

Toronto-based artist Heidi McKenzie explores the stories of Indo-Caribbean women and their descendants in Canada, including her own family, by reconsidering archival imagery and traditional jewellery forms through the lens of photography on translucent porcelain.

In 1833, the end of the legal trade in enslaved people in the British Empire prompted the rise of indentured labour in the Caribbean, particularly among people from India, up to 20 percent of whom were women. Archival studio photography from the late 19th and early 20th centuries documents these women, bedecked with ornate, layered jewellery worn to assert status and as a form of currency and cultural expression.

Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories takes inspiration from archival and family images to explore how descendants of “coolie belles” in Canada today connect to stories of their matrilineal ancestors. The three main elements of the installation—ceramic sculptures viewed alongside historical jewellery; contemporary portraits printed with ceramic pigments and fired onto translucent porcelain; and archival images on porcelain suspended in frames—approach these stories from different points of entry.

“In the GTA nearly one in five people are of South Asian origin. A quarter of us are of Caribbean descent, yet we, much like our stories, are invisible,” says McKenzie. “Many of our parents and grandparents did not discuss, acknowledge, or even know the facts of indentureship. The women—widows or social outcasts—came alone. They were often illiterate, so they wore their banks on their bodies. They earned a few shillings a day, only if they reached their two-ton quota of sugarcane, out of which they had fashioned silver bangles, necklaces, and other jewellery. Later it was the women who fought for increased wages, better working conditions, and an end to child labour on the plantations. Their strength, courage, and defiance paved the way to prosperity and emigration to Canada.”

Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories will be on view in the lobby of the Gardiner Museum from May 4 to August 27, 2023.

For more information visit gardinermuseum.com.

ABOUT HEIDI MCKENZIE

Heidi McKenzie is a Toronto-based ceramic artist. She completed her MFA at OCAD University in 2014. In 2022, McKenzie was a finalist and exhibitor for the Shantz Award, Canada’s national ceramics emerging artist award, and received the FUSION Clay & Glass Award of Achievement. In 2021, McKenzie was juried Best in Show at the exhibition Flux, The Toronto Potters Biennale at the Gardiner Shop. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, in Europe, Southeast Asia, the US, and Canada, including the Toronto International Art Fair. The recipient of numerous grants, McKenzie has created in Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China, and Indonesia. McKenzie uses photography, digital media, and archives to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration, and colonization. She curated and exhibited Decolonizing Clay at the Australian Ceramics Triennale in 2019, and participated in the World Indian Diaspora Congress in Trinidad in 2020. McKenzie was recently inducted into the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva, Switzerland.

ABOUT THE GARDINER MUSEUM

The Gardiner Museum brings together people of all ages and communities through the shared values of creativity, wonder, and community that clay and ceramic traditions inspire.

We engage audiences with exhibitions, programs, and hands-on classes, while stewarding a significant permanent collection. We interpret historical ceramics to emphasize their relevance today, and champion emerging and established Canadian artists and their role in the broader world. The Gardiner Museum innovates through clay education, as we bring together the experience of making with a deeper understanding of the art of ceramics.

We believe in making, looking, and thinking through clay.

The Gardiner Museum has a collection of over 4,000 objects from the Ancient Americas, Europe, Japan and China, as well as contemporary works with an emphasis on leading Canadian artists. It is among the few museums in the world focused on ceramics and is one of the world’s most notable specialty museums.

For more information, please visit: gardinermuseum.com.

ABOUT THE SCOTIABANK CONTACT PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

CONTACT inspires communities through the power of photography. Established in 1997, CONTACT is a not-for-profit organization celebrating the art and profession of photography. Committed to cultivating an inclusive and accessible approach to the medium, CONTACT builds community by providing a platform for dynamic collaborations and productive engagement between Canadian and international photographers, curators, partner organizations, and audiences, locally and globally. In both its annual Festival and in its year-round programming, CONTACT recognizes the significance of photography within all aspects of contemporary life, and the creative possibilities it envisions for the past, present, and future.

-30-

Media Contact:
Rachel Weiner
Senior Manager, Marketing
Gardiner Museum
416.408.5062
[email protected]