When Bobby Baker works, she plays: a study of Drawing on a Mother's Experience and Table Occasion No19

Bobby Baker has been making innovative performance work for more than forty years. This essay takes a fresh look at two works - Drawing on a Mother's Experience and Table Occasion No 19 - through the prism of play theory. Play is sometimes disruptive, messy and dangerous, and it is sometimes silly, funny and welcoming. Through play worlds are created where things can be true and not true at the same time; play is taken seriously, but it is not serious. In play, it is possible to say one thing and to mean another. Exploring Baker's work as play reveals how she is able to present contradictory attitudes simultaneously. These performances engage with - and interrogate - a wide range of topics including the complexity of art, gender, domesticity, professionalism and mental health. Baker's play challenges the status of different forms of work and questions the labours of leisure and care. Each performance concludes with an attempt to reveal a discovery, but always holds back from polemic. This article shows that it is Baker's use of play that makes it possible for the artist to present an astute and nuanced argument in these works.