VOICE - Bobby Baker's Ballistic Buns - PERFORMED VOICE

Medicine Unboxed

Performed Voice: Ballistic Buns is a brief fragment of Bobby Baker's research into her own family history focusing on mental illness, family survival techniques and the impact of war, unhappiness and frustrated ambition on subsequent generations. This 10-minute piece involved tales of the Vicar of Byker, the Ballistic Engineer, the Life Long Anorexic, the 16” German Howitzer named affectionately 'Big Bertha', capable of blasting plenty of folk to smithereens in the First World War, the Dambusters of the Second World War and a Tasty Ending. Bobby Baker is a woman, and an artist. She lives in London. In a career spanning nearly four decades she has, amongst other things, 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 Me 1997- 2008 premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2009, and the accompanying book of the same name won the Mind Book of the Year 2011. Her most recent live show, Mad Gyms & Kitchens, was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Unlimited project for the Cultural Olympiad. Baker is a past recipient of three separate Wellcome Arts Awards, and occupies a unique professional and personal position in the worlds of both the arts and mental health. Following an AHRC Creative Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2011. Bobby Baker is the Artistic Director of Daily Life Ltd, part of the Arts Council National Portfolio.