Art that's good enough to eat
Bobby Baker's An Edible Family in a Mobile Home at the Whitworth Art Gallery | Shirley Valentine at the Liverpool Everyman | Latest NW arts news
It’s a packed edition of Stored Honey that I’m sending out into the world this week so I’m going to keep this introduction brief, except to answer the questions that everyone I’ve told about visiting Bobby Baker’s Edible Family in a Mobile Home has asked me: Yes I did eat the cake, and yes it was tasty. And no, it isn’t unhygienic. The whole place was cleaner than my own kitchen where I’ve only just wiped down all the worktops.
Baker’s installation at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is programmed alongside the Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990. I was planning to write about them together but there’s just so much to say about each that I’m splitting them up. You will be able to read about Women in Revolt! in next week’s Stored Honey.
How Bobby Baker discovered the language of cake
“Have you got a clean pair of tongs?” Not a question you’d usually expect to be coming from the inside of an art installation. But the phrase is out there anyway, as visitors to the reconstruction of Bobby Baker’s groundbreaking - (or should that be groundbaking?) 1976 work clamber for a slice of cake.
Baker’s team bustles around, like the staff in a tea shop, making sure that everyone has been fed. They cut up chunks of cake in the replica prefab’s kitchen, wallpapered with the lifestyle pages of 1970s newspapers, many of them adverts: “Sanatogen Nerve Tonic - Turn lid to unwind”, “I wanted great fashion and Grattan’s got it”, “A sunshine breakfast always has a gold top”. Women’s Hour episodes from the 1970s play on a retro radio.
Back in the sitting room, nobody seems to mind that we are about to tuck into the prefab’s residents. They themselves placidly hang around inside their home, seemingly unbothered by the apparently sinister turn of events. The Father, made of iced Dundee cake from Manchester’s Long Boi's Bakehouse, is lounging in a chair watching comedian Charlie Drake on the black and white telly, close to the Baby (coconut this time) lying quite happily in her cot. In the bedroom, the Older Sister - a girl-shaped wire basket of crisp, white meringues, is poised in a teenage languish. And in the bathroom, the Brother, an ethereal figure made of leaf-shaped Garibaldi biscuits soaks in vegan chocolate cake ‘water’.
Only the mother isn’t edible. A pink wooden torso with a teapot for a head and compartments filled with biscuits and tiny boxes of raisins, she is the original figure from the 1976 incarnation of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home. She was brought out of retirement, after spending decades in Baker’s spare room, for the first restaging of a replica, in 2023 outside Tate Britain.
Cake is Baker’s “language”, she says. And one that it took her time to discover, having felt out of place studying art at St Martin’s School of Art: “I was very passionate about art and very ambitious when I was 17, but I knew that I wasn't being taken seriously as an artist. All the art I saw that was being made… I love painting, but I couldn't relate to it, painting and sculpture. I just couldn't. I remember having this really strong idea that I couldn't fit my ideas in that form.”
She continues: “There was nothing about women artists at the time. There was nothing in any book, honestly. There was no internet. There was one of the tutors at St Martin's that was very unusual, that was Gillian Ayres, a painter, but she was an abstract expressionist and I didn't want to do that.
“I just felt they wouldn't take me seriously. And in fact it got said to me and about me, I heard, that I would just marry a tutor and have children. And of course I got more and more disillusioned and outraged because it was incredibly elitist. And I didn't think art should be like that.”
When she left art school, Baker, who was born in Kent in 1950, says she was so disillusioned that she gave up, but then one night she was making a birthday cake shaped like a baseball when she had “the most unbelievably relaxed, brilliant idea”.
“It came into my mind ‘this is a work of art of great significance’,” she says. And it was so subversive and funny to think of these huge metal girders that were at St Martin’s, matching Anthony Caros’, and this pathetic little cake.”
Baker met some performance artists who inspired her to perform herself - including dressing up as a ‘meringue lady’. By 1976, she was living in one of eight prefab live/work spaces in London, provided to artists by arts organisation Acme, which she transformed into the first incarnation of An Edible Family in A Mobile Home by papering the walls, ceilings and floors with newsprint and baking a family of cake.
It was only when the crowd of visitors had left, with all the food eaten, that Baker realised she had subconsciously created a representation of her own family: “Older sister, older brother and a baby - and that was me, and I’d vanished.”
She says: “Because we'd had this tragedy of my father drowning on a family holiday when I was 15, I think I realised that it was a sort of reflection on what we'd lost, because he was a lovely man. I can sort of make sense of it now but then it was like, ‘oh!’”
Baker describes her childhood up to her father’s death as a time of joy despite her parents’ financial struggles. At school, she was initially, and unfairly, dismissed as “thick”, but discovered a love of art at a girls school her family managed to find the money for. She recalls the excitement of the 60s, the thrill of rationing ending, the happy annual holidays to Norfolk - until, during one trip there when Baker was 15, her “really fun, steady, easy going” father was drowned while swimming in the sea.
‘I realised by the end of the week I'd made my own family, and I felt very sad about it’
“It was profoundly terrible, you can imagine. He was 58,” says Baker. “It was not easy for the nine years after that. My mother was angry and unhappy and I was the one left at home as my brother and sister both married young to escape in a way.
“She was a troubled but wonderful person - much more tempestuous and clever than my father, and frustrated with her life as a housewife. I had great compassion for her and the one thing she did was when I'd gone to the grammar school for sixth form was she realised how unhappy I was, and she got me into evening classes at art school.”
The silence that greeted the death of her father affected Baker deeply. Creating An Edible Family in a Mobile Home in 1976 helped her process her feelings about the tragedy and its aftermath.
“I realised by the end of the week I'd made my own family, and I felt very sad about it,” she says. “But it was fantastic to have made a show where I could think about it.
“Tragedies do happen, and people die and awful things happen, but it's what happens afterwards that matters. “In those days, nobody spoke about it. My mother got help, but we as children didn't. And it was so silent. People were embarrassed. It was taboo. So it left a kind of legacy.”
Despite this, the installation doesn’t feel like an art work of tragedy. It’s strange of course, which is part of its appeal, but also playful and funny. Baker has embellished its newsprint lining with icing - piped outlines of tiles in the bathroom, a cheeky sugar rose covering the face of the model in the Grattan catalogue advert.
Now the clean pair of tongs has been located, it’s time to sample the cake. Slice of Father, anyone? Or perhaps a chomp of Baby?
Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home is at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until Sunday, April 20. It runs alongside the exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, which closes on Sunday, June 1.
Latest arts news
⚽ A brand-new, free, immersive experience of LS Lowry’s Going to the Match is being launched to celebrate arts centre Lowry’s 25th anniversary. Developed with creative studio Layers of Reality, LOWRY 360 will fully surround audiences with the sights and sounds of the painting, transporting them inside before they experience the original artwork first hand.
😾 Two exhibitions aimed at championing the talents and voice of a new generation of artists have opened at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery. In From The Collections, Warrington and Vale Royal College students produced new artworks in response to items in the collection, including an 1842 report on child labour in pin factories, a reticulated python skeleton and even a poster advertising ‘Mr Usher’s Cat Circus’. Meanwhile, in Protest, art and design students from Priestley College responded to the themes of resistance, change and activism to celebrate the voice, concerns and aspirations of a new generation.
💧 Irwell: Afterlife by Liam Spencer opens at Salford Art Gallery & Museum on Saturday, April 5. Once the hardest working and filthiest river in the world, the River Irwell is now an invaluable wildlife corridor within reach of many thousands of people. This exhibition explores the post-industrial landscapes and wildlife of Irwell and its valley through paintings, drawings, photography and film.
In case you missed it
REVIEW: Shirley Valentine, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Shirley Valentine the play is now creeping up on Shirley Valentine the character - the 42-year-old housewife shellshocked by her “wasted” life as she peels the spuds for her husband’s tea and imagines moving to Spain.
Willy Russell’s one-hander premiered at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 1986, when it starred Noreen Kershaw, so it’s an apt choice for the venue’s 60th birthday celebrations. And who better to play the title role this time than Helen Carter, who has appeared in a long list of shows here and at its sister theatre The Playhouse.
Carter is a fantastic comic actor. Not a word of Russell’s witty script is wasted. Every joke lands with perfect timing. She’s as comfortable in Shirley’s skin as the playwright is in writing in a woman’s voice - a charismatic but exhausted, trapped but optimistic, entirely relatable but extraordinary woman’s voice.
She is magnetic and warm, with just a hint of vulnerability peaking through, so when during the first act she crashes under the weight of fizzed out dreams and crept-up insecurities, you are hit with just how bone-weary she is.
The script is a feat of memory, but Shirley isn’t left entirely alone on stage. Set and costumes designer Katie Scott’s 1980s kitchen is like a supporting character. Such attention to detail - a Fairy Liquid bottle next to a sink with taps that pour real water, dark wood units and one of those advertising calendars you used to get free.
Under Stephen Fletcher’s direction, Carter and the set perform a domestic pas de deux of rinsing, wiping, chopping and frying as Shirley cooks real egg and chips live on stage. This is not unique to this production of course, but its still worthy of a gasp from first timers when they see the raw potato that had been placed in the deep fryer minutes earlier has been transformed - just like that - into golden chips.
Shirley Valentine is at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool until Saturday, March 21.
Opening this week
DaDaFest International 40 opens today in Liverpool with a busy line-up of film, large-scale projection, performances, visual arts, workshops and talks on the theme of Rage: A Quiet Riot! Running until Monday, March 31, it includes a Bluecoat Weekender from Saturday, March 22 to Sunday, March 23, featuring the event Rage Reactor, in which artist Zack Mennell will work with an archive of NHS and DWP letters, and with family photos, to create a commissioned installation alongside three performances.
There will also be an interactive performance from Dora Colquhoun in the Bluecoat Garden, where the fictional National Bureau for Sitting will assess members of the public to see whether they can take a seat in a very comfortable Chesterfield chair, and Pop Up Poetry presented by Liverpool-based poet Amina Atiq.
Now booking
A Manchester run has been added to the UK tour of award-winning musical The Bodyguard. It will now be at the Manchester Opera House in January 2026, as well as its already announced Liverpool Empire dates in June 2026. Casting announcements are expected soon.
Thank you for reading the 122nd edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed what you read then please hit the ❤️ button as it helps to get it shown more widely.
I’m off now for a walk in the late winter sunshine before heading to the DaDaFest International 40 launch. In the meantime, you can get hold of me on Instagram, on Bluesky, in the comments or by replying to this email.
Have a great week,
Laura