Bobby Baker (artist)

Bobby Baker
Born 1950 (age 67–68)
Kent
Occupation Artist

Bobby Baker (born 1950, Kent) is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist working across performance, drawing and multi-media. Baker is the Artistic director of the arts organisation Daily Life Ltd.

Information

Baker lives in London, England. She studied painting at St. Martins School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) between 1968 and 1972. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Queen Mary University London in 2011. In a career spanning over four decades she has, amongst other things, danced with meringue ladies; made a life-sized edible version of her family; and driven around the streets of Haarlem, Holland strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to Pull Yourselves Together.

Daily Life Ltd is an arts organisation that produces the work of Baker and others. Together they create powerful art that investigates and questions the way people think about feminism, daily life and mental health. These artworks cross many disciplines and provide unique, high quality artistic experiences for a wide range of audiences both nationally and internationally. They seek to challenge the stigmatisation and discrimination of people with experience of mental distress and raise public awareness of this vital sector. In March 2011 Daily Life Ltd became part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio.

Activism

Baker’s 2009 Wellcome Trust Diary Drawing exhibition about her experience of mental illness and recovery launched her onto a worldwide platform of mental health and arts campaigners, connecting her with a growing network of organisations and practitioners. Since then, she has aimed to use her position to help promote and foster opportunities for diverse marginalised artists. Her work focuses on undervalued and stigmatised aspects of everyday life and human behaviour, expressly undertaking to foreground the lives of women in the mainstream and bring status to so-called ‘humble’ daily activity.

As an internationally acclaimed female artist with personal experience of mental illness and physical disability, Baker offers an authentic figure of recovery and leadership through creativity. She is uniquely positioned with the experience, insight, talent and extensive cross-disciplinary network to investigate and celebrate creative ways people manage difficulties and disenfranchisement.

Further reading

  • Michèle Barrett, Bobby Baker (2007), Bobby Baker: redeeming features of daily life, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-44411-8

Dear Diary, Outside In The Interview: Bobby Baker, The Guardian Loose Ends, BBC Radio 4

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