Interview: Bobby Baker, artist

I was at St Martins in the 70s doing paintings and I just couldn't relate to that commercial world, but I loved making things and I just decided at the end of leaving art school to reject the elitism of the art world and to be a business woman. The Royal College kept rejecting me anyway. I was selling these baseball boots that I hand dyed. I did make money but it just got really wearing. I'd always liked making cakes, I started decorating cakes when I was quite young, it was my thing, and I bought some madeira cake - I must have had a plan, it must have been for a birthday, as I carved this cake into a boot during one evening in this horrible place I was living - and then I iced it. At about midnight as I looked at this cake, and it was one of the founding moments of my artistic life. It was this revelation, that I'd made a work of art. And what I loved about it was that it was so badly made, it was sort of dribbly, and you know, the British School of Sculpture based at St Martins all reverently followed Anthony Caro and all that lot, all his acolytes marching up and down the corridors making these huge macho sculptures which had Greek names, and I just felt like - and I still do to this day - like going in there and saying, “now here is A Work of Art of Great Significance”, dun dun dahhh (dramatic music)! It was like I knew I could be an artist on my own terms - that was the turning point.

So I just threw myself into making cakes. I'm still lugging round paintings I did at Art School that I can't quite bring myself to throw away, because I really wasn't into selling work, so the fact that I could now make these things that could be an event, that got consumed and became part of people's bodies was just, delightful. For the parties I had - tea parties - I would spend days making these elaborate little sculptures, a naked woman sitting on a chair, all these little models and meringue ladies laid on the table – the parties were such a flop - everyone standing around, nobody knew what to do. But then I met some performance artists, and by then I was making these life size babies on meat platters, and doing all these drawings about them, so they invited me to bring them along and that was it really, it all started from there.

I did my first performance at Oval house - no actually before that I did one dressed as Princess Anne, in Charing Cross road on her wedding day, we're the same age, it was so wonderful not being her, while performing her and I had the baby cake on a meat platter stabbing it with a knife. Ever so random and experimental that early work - everyone was horrified. The main thing became these little meringue ladies that I still make, supposedly dressed up like them. I’ve taken them many places over the years - in my 20s I ending up dancing on them and handing them out to people. They're really desirable these little things and they were like my team of strong women - my little crew in a way - but so absurd, delicate and brittle. I like meringue - what happens to it.

I did a History of Modern Art out of sugar, meticulously iced onto canvas boards, and I made what was one of the biggest achievement’s of my career, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (an entire life-size family made of cake and meringue in her Stepney Pre-fab house). It was 1976 and I was 26 years old. I was absolutely determined to do everything, the whole place. I put newsprint on the walls of each room that was appropriate to who was in the room, but then I iced on top of it. In the main room where the father and the baby were it was all the popular press, and I iced around all the figures. In the bedroom where the teenage daughter was sort of suspended, there were these wild iced drawings of her dancing naked - you wouldn't have recognised it, but in my mind they were. What I loved about sugar at the time and I think I still do, is that smell to it - the crystalline beauty of it, and the whole house was sugar – the walls and figures sparkled. It it was utterly beautiful but that didn’t last throughout the week - it became grotesque as it got eaten. Sugar just has that specialness, delight, people just love things made out of it, you can make things from pastry but they’re not as special as the brittleness of sugar.

One of the other early performance things I did was a life size version of Christmas dinner made out of cake, like the jelly, the Christmas pudding, the turkey, the dish of vegetables. I took it to a party at St Martins - I worked through the night, a ridiculous amount of work, drove it up there, and of course during the party it all got completely smashed and crushed on the floor. So only some of it got eaten. It was rather a wasted effort so I made miniature versions of the meal – 9 peppermint cream dishes served on a tiny silver cake board. 

I so loved those tiny sugar meals that for my most recent project Great & Tiny War in Newcastle, I made new versions of those peppermint creams for one of the rooms. I wanted to convey the idea of the amount of hard invisible labour involved in caring for a family. The title for that room was Grossly Undervalued Domestic Products, based on an extraordinary Adam Smith Memorial lecture given by Sandi Toksvig. She coined that phrase, about domestic labour. So clever. I worked out that if one person cooked three meals a day throughout the duration of the First World War that would be 4701 meals. I wanted to display that work using the peppermint creams. I collaborated with  my son Charlie Whittuck who's a designer and maker. He made an extraordinary stainless steel revolving multi- tiered stand - referencing Newcastle's engineering history - which slowly revolved. On it were arranged the 4701 peppermint cream meals. The room smelt of peppermint. I wanted to celebrate all that labour by producing a really stunning tribute.

It's quite an addictive thing - that's not quite the right word but it’s really hard to resist sugar. I get chronic health problems as a result of past chemo and psychiatric medication, which causes rashes and sometimes sugar cravings. It's a quick fix - I’ve always had a blood sugar issue, I know if I have sugar at the wrong time of day it's disastrous, because I just crash. I’m wary of it. I haven’t got a very sweet tooth but I do like a fruity yoghurt. I love a good pudding. I love afternoon tea. If you look at the history of it, it's become ubiquitous and it's awful the way it was produced. I grew up in the 50s so it was a real treat - part of me knows that it's rare and special. I try to avoid sugar as part of my everyday life now, I like making cakes but only for occasions. If sugar is in your diet for a special occasion it's wonderful.

It's powerful in terms of its memories and associations. I don't take sugar in my tea - I was told I was thick at school, and it was the saving of me, because my mother thought the school was stupid anyway, so she moved me to the local boarding school as a day girl when I was 9 - but when we went up to senior school at 11 - we used to eat together and we got mixed up with the older girls - we used to have afternoon tea, and I was too nervous to ask them to pass the sugar! I could have sugar in my tea at home, that's what you did - it was the thing, but I’ve never had it since, because I was too shy to ask.  Quite a profound experience at that age. We were allowed to take in pots of jam as extras, so you had your own special pot. We had a really close group of six friends. I remember one tea, we had those synthetic supposed split donuts with the artificial cream, a great delicacy, and we were larking around, and my friend squashed one in my face which I thought was the funniest thing ever and she still feels bad about it. But it was that larking around with food, a really powerful force in terms of childhood associations. My brother and I would save up pocket money for weeks before we'd go to Norfolk, then we'd get a tin, and we'd put all our sweets together, and we'd eat them in one go. Sweets are such a childhood treasure, the only thing we'd spend money on. I don’t remember ever buying toys but sweets... they cost so little you could afford them.