Brick by Brick: Absence & Presence
Heidi McKenzie
June 21st – August 23rd, 2024
I was inspired by my father’s telling of his experience in the 1950s in Hamilton, Ontario while touring the former I-XL Brick & Tile factory in Medicine during my residency in 2019 at the Shaw Centre for International Ceramics (part of Medalta in the Historic Clay District).
My father, Joseph McKenzie, (1930-2016) was born and raised in Trinidad, under British Colonial rule. My father was a very dark-skinned man of Indian descent. He came to Canada in 1953 to study at McMaster University. Canada pre-1968, exercised a whites-only immigration policy. My father, and his brother were two of five persons of colour on campus. During the summer, he and his brother worked in the furnaces at Stelco in Hamilton, Ontario. They were brick masons, assigned to the hottest temperature job. They worked alongside workers of African descent. What struck me, and continues to haunt me, is the fact that the white foremen openly assumed that the darker your skin, the more heat you could withstand. This inquiry propelled the questions I explore in Brick by Brick: Absence vs Presence.
