Artist Bobby Baker talks feminism, family and edible art

Whitworth Art Gallery is currently home to an installation quite literally good enough to eat. Artist Bobby Baker has recreated her An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976, 2023) enlisting the help of Long Boi’s Bakehouse to make the edible family, including a meringue daughter, coconut cake baby and chocolate bath water. It’s on display as part of Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, a wide-range exhibition of feminist art. Almost 50 years on, Bobby is still passionate about her original creation and explains how its meaning continues to be relevant today.

What was the original message you intended for An Edible Family in a Mobile Home?

Bobby: “I wouldn’t have said just one thing. I was very passionate to make work where people lived that was accessible to them, because the art world when I was at art school – I went to Central St Martins School of Art – I found it very elitist. It was incredibly male, of course, even though there were women artists, we didn’t know about them.

“Obviously, a lot of it was sort of unconscious, but I had realised quite young that the reason I was making the work was for myself, essentially. It was to make sense of my life as a young woman. I mean, I call myself a feminist, but very much critiquing how stuck people were in their roles. The basis of every single thing that happens in the world, which is family life and the care of children and day-to-day, the words even are… they’re not respected. It has no status, so it’s like drudgery. And yet, where would we be if we didn’t run this world successfully? I now see that this is life. People having baths and having fantasy dreams, dancing in bedrooms and my dad watching comedy. It could be cliché, but it isn’t because it’s so strange.”

And so many years on, redoing it, do you think the message still applies?

Bobby: “Oh my gosh, yeah. And also, I think the pandemic has shown that. I’ve got two children and five grandchildren, and it’s fascinating seeing their lives sort of replay the same dilemmas. Things have changed and some things have got better, but there’s much more pressure on both parents to work or one person to do a ridiculous amount. And there’s still lack of… I’m going to call it status, but the lack of value. Sandi Toksvig calls it ‘Grossly Undervalued Domestic Product’. So, you value the bread and things, but you don’t factor in the cost of this labour.

“And I feel it’s a very exciting time, actually, because what happened in the pandemic – very much in our part of the world and globally in certain cultures – was you could see how that worked, because people are living at home and you could see into each other’s houses. And I think that’s where art is so glorious, because I want to change the way people think. But it’s not me kind of telling you this, I want you to come and experience it and then go away and think differently.”

You said before how elitist and sexist you found certain parts of art. Do you think it’s still like that?

Bobby: “Yeah, bits of it, yeah. I mean, I think it’s the nature of the work, but I’ve had an exciting time. And I think the gallery scene has really changed. I think because there’s a value to art, sometimes it’s about money and power, but most artists want it to be more than that. And I think you always have that part of it, but there’s a lot more work that is focused on reaching people in a way that it wasn’t when I was young.”

With the family being made of cake, was there ever any part of you that thought of remaking this as a more permanent thing?

Bobby: “No. No, what I loved was – because up until I was about 28, I made work out of food – what I loved was that it got eaten and I didn’t have to store it! No, I think it was the whole point. I didn’t want to make anything that could be bought or sold. I wanted it to happen. And I was very lucky I met Andrew, who documented my work, but that was just good fortune. So, I’ve got very good records of it, but no, I very much didn’t want to do that.”

This is part of the Women in Revolt! Exhibition and you call yourself a feminist now, but why did you never call yourself a feminist when you were younger?

Bobby: “In 1974/5 the words were women’s liberation and bra burners. Feminism became a word that I became aware of about this time, and I went to an incredible series of evening classes called the Philosophical Analysis of Feminism, which was profoundly life-changing to kind of understand the rationale in a much more complex way.

“But I was sort of in between generations. I didn’t do that, and I wasn’t part of any of those groups. I agreed with that, but it’s the language that’s changed. It’s so different. You didn’t have the internet, you didn’t have those conversations, and so it was what was in my head that was doing it, and nobody else was doing anything quite like that.”

How important is it to have these exhibitions? Do you think that would have changed your journey through art if there had been women focused and feminist focused exhibitions?

Bobby: “Well, there were, I just didn’t know. Finally in 1980, I was invited to be in a show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts where I’d done a lot of work in the 70s. It was called About Time, sort of framing feminism, and there were two big shows; one was visual arts and one was time-based work or performance. I did a show and that’s where I saw this work. It wasn’t cake and sugar, but it was like fabric and photography and all this, and I thought, ‘oh, it’s not just me’. I didn’t know those artists, and they’d been doing that, and I’d been doing this, and then we connected. It was a wonderful, wonderful exhibition to be part of because we all had similar passions and ideas, but we didn’t know about each other necessarily, unless you were part of a collective, and so as I got older, I found, ‘oh, yeah, they were doing that’, and then you don’t feel so alone.

“And actually, just to tip in that I think a lot of us didn’t know about each other because we had children. I had my first child in 1983, and I became completely cut off from the art world and did other work for a while. I ended up making my own work for eight years until I came back with performance, and I think that you’re quite isolated. You weren’t hanging out in the studio because you didn’t have time to look after your children and work.”

And of course you can’t be here every day, who are hosts this time around?

Bobby: “We’ve got 11 [University of Manchester masters students] and they have to do 20 days work experience. They’re going to be the hosts. So, we’ve trained them and there’s going to be at least five of them every day. And we have a host producer this time. So they’re kind of running the house. And what worked so incredibly well was that they all got a huge amount out of it. They come from different parts of the world, actually, and the same as in London. And so they brought their own kind of cultural view on hosting and hospitality and how to behave. Some of the boys [in London], they said, ‘that man, that father, he’s just lazy sod, isn’t he? He’s just sitting there watching the telly’. And I went, ‘no! He’s my father! He’s a lovely man!’

“So, all of these discussions about roles, and also people can talk to them. That’s something I would love. I’ve done a lot of work that’s performances. And then people go, and they talk to each other. But this is particularly wonderful to have the chance where people can talk to the hosts and each other and come back again. And it’s free! You can’t stay too long because we get people coming and going but you can go round and round.”

Bobby Baker’s An Edible Family in a Mobile Home at the Whitworth is open from 7 March 2025 until 20 April 2025 between 10.30am-4pm on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and 2pm-8pm on Thursdays. It is part of the Women in Revolt exhibition that runs from 7 March to 1 June 2025.