Melanie Garcia & Yuki Kéké Tam
© Photo Credits: Yuki Kéké Tam, 2025.
Potato Print Soup Workshop with Melanie Garcia and Yuki Kéké Tam
Sunday, March 8, 2026 from 12 to 2 PM.
Please register in advance so that we can prepare the ingredients.
Workshop is facilitated in English but all languages are welcome.
Led by artists Melanie Garcia and Yuki Kéké Tam, Potato Print Soup is a 2-hour participatory printing and cooking workshop that uses food as a conduit for intimacy, care, and relational exchange. Drawing from practices of DIY craft, communal food-making, and conversational gathering the workshop invites participants to reflect on what impressions (both literal and metaphorical) we experience and consume.
Garcia and Tam will start the workshop with a 15 minute introduction of relief printmaking as a site of connection. They will then share aspects of their own practices that centre material explorations in printmaking and print’s association with community (re)structuring. They will then guide participants through the two workshop activities.
In the first activity, participants have 30-40 minutes to carve with small knives and kitchen tools small icons onto potato halves. Ideas and samples will be provided as a resource. The emphasis is on the process, allowing participants to experiment with printing, transfer, and mark-making using an unconventional surface. Prints will be made using different kinds of inks including ones created from soy sauce, nori paste, or cake decorating ink. In the second part, the participants will cut up their potatoes and add it to the communal soup pot. The artistic tools will become an ingredient in a shared meal of potato and leek soup. This alchemizing of art to food to nourishment and back is a cycle; it blurs the lines between art and life, labour and work, and corporeal and intangible. This workshop foregrounds the poetic possibilities that emerge when collective labour and play becomes sources of sustenance and warmth.
The workshop concludes with an optional eating circle, where participants may reflect on their experience, share insights, and exchange prints if they choose.
Melanie Garcia and Yuki Kéké Tam both practice care-driven pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of community-led spaces through their interdisciplinary artistic practices. Together, they create a workshop that balances vulnerability, fun, and offering participants a meaningful encounter with food as a creative and transformative material.
Facilitators
© Photo Credits: Yuki Kéké Tam, 2025.
Yuki Kéké Tam (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator of Chinese descent living on Turtle Island (colonial Canada). In their multi-disciplinary practice, they examine quiet resistance and care woven into everyday life. Their practice is currently nurtured through a Masters of Fine Arts (Concordia University) with funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec and their previous Bachelors of Arts double major in Studio Arts and Human Rights & Equities (York University). Their work has been featured in Canada and internationally at the International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking, Artists, Concepts and Techniques Conference, the Arts and Interdisciplinary Research Journal (Airea), the Toronto public transit system (TTC), and SNAPLine magazine.
© Photo Credits: Alex Blouin, 2025.
Melanie Garcia is an artist and art educator of Filipino descent born in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Informed by collage methodologies her work explores identity, dislocation and cultural knowledge. Using family archives, digital manipulation, woodblock and screen printing, Garcia’s work navigates the intersections of personal history, fiction, and the mutable nature of memory. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and Europe, with editorial commissions in The Marshall Project, The Guardian, and The Walrus. As a teaching artist she has offered art workshops to youth in and around Tiohtià:ke/Montreal for over a decade. She is pursuing an MFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University, is part of the Textiles & Materiality research cluster at Milieux Institute and is board member of Céline Bureau.
Accessibility
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page. We are committed to creating an inclusive and welcoming space for all.
Considering ongoing COVID-19 and flu transmissions, please note that mask wearing is strongly recommended during events.