Heidi Samida

As the daughter of immigrants, Heidi Samida navigates the space between Canadian culture and the expectations rooted in her family’s European heritage. This tension shapes Heidi’s perspective and acts as a springboard for exploring identity, belonging, and the values we carry or let go.

Ceramics gives her a material language for these questions. Through figurative forms, Heidi examines how identity is shaped by pressure, interplay, and transformation. 

Heidi’s practice centres on the raw and authentic nature of the material. She highlights cracks with oxides and allow the surface to retain its history. Each stage of the ceramic cycle reflects lived experience and the resilience found in being altered yet continuing.

Heidi aims to create work that invites a second look and encourages viewers to reconsider what they assume to be fixed. By emphasizing change, tension, and the traces left behind, my work reflects an evolving identity shaped through sustained making and the quiet persistence of clay.

Heidi is a self‑taught ceramic artist based in Kelowna, British Columbia. Working in hand‑built sculptural forms, her practice explores creative resilience, material honesty, and the evolving nature of identity. Through clay, she investigates how pressure, fracture, and repair shape both objects and lived experience.

Her work has been exhibited at the Lake Country Art Gallery, the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Rotary Centre for the Arts contributing to the region’s contemporary sculptural dialogue. Heidi’s pieces have been acquired by private collectors, reflecting the growing resonance of her material‑driven practice. She continues to develop a body of work grounded in process, transformation, and the mastery of clay as a vessel for narrative and change.