Bobby Baker performance

50 minutes

Originally intended as a one-off performance work to make sense of the first eight years of motherhood, Bobby Baker’s Drawing on a Mother’s Experience gained widespread critical acclaim and went on to be shown multiple times over the next 12 years. Having learned caution as a mother and the ability to think ahead, the performance sites Baker as a meticulously prepared action painter, who has substituted oil paint and canvas for a double bed sheet and various foodstuffs. Poking fun at her male predecessors (artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others) Baker’s revelatory commentary interrogates domesticity, motherhood and the role of the artist, using each ingredient to represent a specific event or episode in her recent personal history.   

In 2015, the artist revisited the work and devised an updated version: Drawing on a (Grand) Mother’s Experience. 

Credits

Co-director: Polona Baloh Brown
Film: Deborah May