Bobby Baker - Drawing on Mother's Experience 1988

Bobby Baker is a live performance artist whose work “daringly confronted the fragilities and pleasure of human existence with challenging honesty”[1]. Drawing on Mothers Experience[2] is no exception to Bakers honest, personal style of performing. The title of this piece is quite self-explanatory as Baker, who had trained previously as a painter, literally draws upon her experience as a mother and then visually draws and depicts this on a large white sheet on the floor.

 

Baker has performed this piece many times both live and recorded. With her reworking the piece in 2015 to become Drawing on Grandmothers Experience, showing how the piece is an everlasting developing form of documentation that grows and changes with Bakers own life experiences. For this analysis, I will be referring to the recorded version of the original piece which was then distributed on DVD.

 

The performance starts with Baker directly addressing the audience through the camera. She takes on the role as storyteller of her own life. She lays out a large white sheet on the floor and begins her drawing, talking through each carefully chosen ingredient as though it is a tutorial. This cooking tutorial style video leads Baker into the role of societies perfect domestic housewife and mother figure.

 

Each ingredient stands in for a different memory of Bakers life since motherhood. She makes prints on the sheet with roast beef and recalls how the day she went into labour the family enjoyed a lunch of roast beef. Then Baker mixes water with milk as she claims this mixture creates a similar consistency to breast milk as she carefully splatters this across the sheet in a deliberate direction. Next Baker brings out some homemade fish pies in takeaway tins and tells the audience how she remembers her own mother making these as quick comforting meals for Baker and her family. She squeezes them out and plops them onto the sheet, again positioning them in a way that absolutely makes sense to Baker. These are just three of the many ingredients Baker uses. Once all the ingredients have been drawn onto the sheet Baker rolls herself in the sheet, covering herself in the ingredients and encapsulating herself in her motherhood painting. Baker then cleans up and dances around the set to the Nina Simone track My Baby Just Cares For Me.

 

I find this performance very useful to my own work as I too am exploring the theme and expectation of motherhood. Like Baker each material I am working with has been carefully thought out through my own internal logic, in my case, using the grid method and drawing upon my own relationship with my mother. Baker explains the logic of her ingredients to her audience as she plays out the domestic mother role. As this is something I am looking to challenge, the logic of each of my elements is less overtly obvious, but is just as systematically selective as Baker. I am taking from Baker the selectivity of her elements, the personal attachment she has towards these ingredients, and the way her theme and experience can be read in every element even down to the sound that plays at the end of the piece. 

 

[1] Bobby Baker, ‘Bobby Baker’, in Redeeming Features of Everyday Life, ed. Michele Barrett and Bobby Baker, [Routledge 2007, Oxon] 

[2] Bobby Baker, Drawing on Mothers Experience, filmed by Deborah May at Jacksons Lane Art Centre, London 2000.

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