Review Feature: WHO | intimate portrait | Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings | Wellcome Collection

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The Review - FEATURE
Published: 14 May 2009

One of Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings:
Mental Illness

Intimate portrait of mental illness

THE World Health Organisation estimates that by 2025 mental illness will be the second-biggest global health problem after heart disease.
And with an £18million campaign, Time to Change, launched earlier this year backed by sufferers, including Stephen Fry and Alistair Campbell, awareness of mental health is growing.
Art and Mental Illness, a series of free exhibitions and events at the Wellcome Collection in Euston Road, will help shed more light on the issue.
Talking about feelings and private experiences is not always easy. So artist Bobby Baker found painting to be a more digestible medium for dealing with painful and difficult emotions.
“There are lots of words and stories coming out about mental illness but not a lot of drawings. Painting them was a very soothing process. Although I was initially horrified by the images, I actually found it very satisfying to paint something I had experienced,” she said.
Baker is primarily known as a performance artist with a sweet tooth – she has made a life-size cake family (An Edible Family in a Mobile Home) and taught the history of modern painting using only sugar. As an artist – and as an individual who has gone “barking mad” – she has been praised for her enduring humour.
“I think it’s good to have humour in my work because we’re not supposed to laugh about mental illness. The humour thing and laughing about it is just a way of being for me. It’s quite a useful facility to make people laugh and it’s also a powerful way of looking at humiliating situations.”
Painting was the ultimate catharsis for Baker, a process which began in 1997 when she was a mental health patient at a day centre. Her watercolour paintings, or Diary Drawings, illuminate her experience of the mental health system and struggle with mental illness and breast cancer. But how does it feel to be constantly reminded of her tumultuous past?
“I do find it painful to look at some of the really sad drawings which remind me of how bad things were,” she said. “However, I didn’t find the actual process of creating them painful. It’s a method of communicating with people so it’s actually very empowering.
“I look back and think about what was then and what is now and as a result I see something very positive coming from it all.”
APRIL WELSH

• Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, 1997-2008, is at the Wellcome Collection, 83 Euston Road, NW1, until August 2. Free

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The Lenkiewicz exhibition is stunning from the remarkable St Eustace sculpture to the drawings featuring unicorns, tigers and Elvis! The skeletons and skulls were my particular favourite along with the octopus drowning the Titanic. The surroundings are fabulous; the Pite architecture lends itself so well to the mood. I admit I have a particular fondness for
the building having worked there for 26 years.
J. Trend-Hill

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