Education
Central Saint Martins.
Central Saint Martins.
Baker lives in London, England. Her most recent show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad. Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Limited.
Daily Life Limited is the disability-led arts organisation that produces the work of Bobby Baker, one of the United Kingdom’s most celebrated artists.
Together with fellow collaborators, they investigate and celebrate daily life and its limitations through an ambitious programme of artworks focusing on arts in health and mental wellbeing.
These artworks cross many disciplines and provide unique, high quality artistic experiences for a wide range of audiences both nationally and internationally. Above all they challenge the stigmatisation and discrimination of people with experience of mental illness and raise public awareness of this vital sector.
In March 2011 Daily Life Limited became part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. In 1996, Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and then breast cancer.
During her recovery, she wrote Mental Illness and Maine, a diary of drawings.
lieutenant consists of a public presentation of her drawings and watercolors that are considered to be poignant, honest, funny, moving, and shocking. Over the span of 11 years of healing. lieutenant serves as a personal journal and a depiction of her recovery that allows the audience to get an inside view and translation of what goes on in her head, a visual representation of her experiences, expressed through 771 drawings that served as her emotional release for over a decade.
In a career spanning nearly 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 London strapped to the back of a truck yelling at passers by through a megaphone to ‘Pull Yourselves Together.’ Baker’s touring exhibition Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Maine premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011.
