Talker #13: Bobby Baker #898779

Talker is an interview zine about performance by Giles Bailey.

Issue #13 is a conversation with Bobby Baker.

Bobby’s acclaimed intersectional feminist practice includes performance, drawing, and installation. It persistently exposes the undervalued and stigmatised aspects of women’s daily lives. Her live work in particular has been a distinctive and significant contribution to the shape performance art has taken over the past five decades.

In this career-spanning interview, Bobby describes her creative journey from encounters with a germinal performance art scene at St. Martins School of Art in the early 1970s to current collaborative and participatory projects. She is generously open about her process, sharing accounts of a practice that, though often playfully witty and wild, never shies from darker and more complex themes bound up in challenges with mental health, structural sexism and gendered labour in domestic spaces. Her 1976 installation, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976) was remade in 2023 as part of Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain which toured to the Whitworth, Manchester in 2025.

Giles Bailey is an artist based in London. He works with performance, using texts, video fragments and choreographies to explore how knowledge and meaning are generated through relationships with others. Since 2016 he has published Talker.

Issues of Talker have featured Ian White, Kate Valk, Richard Maxwell, Sue Tompkins, Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker, Dora García, Jo Fong, Paul Maheke, Clifford Owens, Barby Asante, Gustav Metzger, Miranda July, Agus Nur Amal PMTOH, and Bobby Baker.