Britain’s feminist Bobby Baker’s Edible Installation at Tate Britain. Take a bite!

ART

Britain’s feminist Bobby Baker’s Edible Installation at Tate Britain. Take a bite!

Text: Oxana De Castro

Photo: Hugo Glendinning, Larina

Fernandes, The Independent,

Madeleine Buddo.

November 14 2023

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Text: Oxana De Castro

Photo: Hugo Glendinning, Larina

Fernandes, The Independent,

Madeleine Buddo.

November 14 2023

SHARE ARTICLE

Visitors to Tate Britain are greeted with an unusual sight: an apartment, seemingly lifted straight from East London, complete with a family composed entirely of baked goods. This art installation, far from your average home scene, features a meringue daughter immersed in music, a biscuit son in a chocolate bath, a fruitcake father by the TV, a coconut cake baby, and a mother near the kitchen, represented by a dressmaker’s mannequin with a teapot head.

This creative display is not a segment from “The Great British Bake Off.” It’s a reimagined version of Bobby Baker’s 1976 artwork “An Edible Family in a Mobile Home.” Baker, known for her performance art, used her own Stepney home as the backdrop to construct this unconventional family, inviting locals to literally taste her art while she served tea.

Baker, inspired at the age of 25 by Claes Oldenburg and Patty Mucha’s “The Store,” which featured food item sculptures in a faux store, developed her own artistic language through edible creations. Her Meringue Ladies World Tour, where piped meringue figures danced and were then destroyed, embodied this ethos.

Rejecting the elitism she perceived in traditional art circles, Baker found solace and freedom in performance art, using it to mirror the lives and settings of her community. The Tate Britain’s reenactment of her work involved a team and custom cakes from Lili Vanilli, set against a backdrop of period-appropriate media materials, all adorned with hand-piped icing.

This edible family scene is part of the larger “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990” exhibition at Tate Britain, which celebrates the diverse experiences and contributions of women in the arts.

The exhibit, free for public viewing, will eventually contribute its materials to Idle Women, an organization dedicated to women’s causes, aligning with Baker’s vision of art serving current societal needs.

Portrait of Bobby Baker with An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain.

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