Exhibition: Tate Britain presents An Edible Family in a Mobile Home

A prefabricated house is going to be built outside the Tate Britain, on the South Lawn.

The house will be filled with five life-size sculptures of an artist’s family members – made from cake, biscuits and meringues. These sculptures are to be eaten by the public.

From November 8, Tate Britain will present a restaging of a major feminist artwork which has not been seen for almost 50 years: Bobby Baker’s radical sculptural installation An Edible Family in a Mobile Home.

Visitors to Tate Britain will be invited into the house to sample these edible sculptures and talk to hosts, trained by Ms Baker.

The restaged Edible Family will be free to visit and open to the public for the first four weeks of the exhibition November 8, to December 3, and again for the final four weeks of the exhibition from March 8 until April 7.

Ms Baker originally staged her installation over the course of a week in 1976 East London.

Visitors ate pieces of her cake ‘family’ and Ms Baker served cups of tea, performing the role of polite female host.

The family members occupied various rooms in Ms Baker’s home, whose walls were plastered in newspaper cuttings and decorated with icing, scenting the air with sugar.

In the living room, a father made of fruit cake slumped in an armchair surrounded by tabloid newspapers, in the bath, a teenage son made of garibaldi biscuits lay in chocolate cake bathwater against a background of comics, and in the kitchen, a mother constructed from a dressmaker’s mannequin with a teapot for a head offered a constant supply of fairy cakes, sandwiches and fruit from compartments in her hollow abdomen.

Ms Baker baked, sculpted and decorated each of these family members herself over the course of a month.

The house outside Tate Britain  will be a replica of the original work, with several elements updated by the artist.

The hosts will include students from nearby Chelsea College of Arts, part of University of the Arts London, and young women recruited through race and class inclusion charity You Make It.

Tickets: www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/tate-britain-to-host-edible-artwork-by-bobby-baker

Picture: Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, 1976 Picture: Andrew Whittuck