Bobby Baker performance and installation

10 June 1974

90 minutes

M&B Motors Exhibition Space, Goldsmiths College, London

Created for an art school context, Bobby Baker’s ‘life room’ presented a 360 degree floor to ceiling sequence of huge naked women painted onto newspaper. The women were positioned around the perimeter of the room and, in opposition to the seven stages of man, transformed from a cake into the tree of life. The ‘life model’ referenced in the title of the work was depicted by Baker as a fully-sized naked woman made from an iced sponge cake. 

The work also included a performance by Baker. Reflecting on this in her book, Redeeming Features of Daily Life, Baker notes that while she had previously been apprehensive about talking during her performances, a single comment made in The Life Room – ‘You know what, I’m going to squash this bloody tomato with this hammer’ – convinced her of the need to place trust in her hunches and humour after it was met with ‘a gale of laughter’.