Drawing Around Food

The panel discussion will explore themes around the right to female pleasure, domesticity, race, and revulsion in the context of food politics.

This discussion will be hosted live on Zoom 4 – 5:30 pm GMT, Sun 4th July, with live subtitles provided by Stagetext. 

About the speakers:

Born in 1950, Kent, Bobby Baker lives and works in London. Baker’s acclaimed intersectional feminist practice includes performance, drawing, and installation and persistently exposes the undervalued and stigmatised aspects of women’s daily lives: from domestic labour to recovery and survival in the mental health system. Key works include Drawing on a Mother’s Experience (1988), Kitchen Show (1991), Diary Drawings (1997-2008), and most recently, Great & Tiny War (2018). Over a four-decade career Baker has performed and exhibited her work extensively across the UK and internationally. Venues range from her own kitchen and other domestic spaces to world-renowned festivals, museums, galleries and performing arts centres including Southbank Centre, the ICA (London), Barbican, IKON Gallery: Münchner Künstlerhaus, Munich; P.S.122 New York and Performing Arts Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Adelaide Festival, Victoria; World Stage Festival, Toronto. 

Born 1987, Lindsey Mendick lives and works in London. Mendick’s practice is hinged on her skilled work in ceramics, which she describes being drawn to for its tactile nature and its desire to be manipulated by the maker. She also embraces banner painting, sewing, metalwork, furniture making, and sound within her autobiographical practice. By playfully combining low culture iconography and high culture methods of construction, Mendick creates humorously decadent and elaborate installations that enable the viewer to explore their personal history in a cathartic fashion. 

Born in 1996 in Peterborough, Olivia Sterling lives and works in London. Sterling uses painting to address questions of blackness and whiteness in twenty-first century Britain. Her work presents scenes of colourful mayhem with a nostalgic twist and signature ‘slapstick’ style, combining joyous celebration with a subtle critique of racialised ways of seeing. Blending pointed references like this into her depiction of ordinary scenes and subjects, Sterling’s work reflects on how we are confronted by racialized discourse everywhere in the everyday. Even happy or anodyne spaces are encoded with structures of othering and difference; every object, every skin tone, is assigned its place in a drama that continues beyond the edges of the canvas. 

Born in 1986 in Malaysia, Caroline Wong lives and works in London. For Wong, the act of creating, much like eating, is sensuous and consuming. Whether found, recovered, or taken from life models, images of women are her work's foundation. As the connecting tissue of her practice is a subversive response to traditional, restricted representations of East Asian women, she looks for a kind of confidence, a rebellion, an emotional voluptuousness in her subjects which translates to the way she works. Wong luxuriates in the epicurean side of herself, producing excitable, expressive marks and heated, joyful colour driven by a hedonistic desire for fun, producing work that is a jubilant pushback against tradition. Her work is held in public and private collections including The Wing, London, and The Royal Institution, London.

Born in 1990, London, Huma Kabakcı is a second-generation collector, independent curator, and founding director of Open Space, living and working between London and Istanbul. Kabakcı recently joined the Drawing Room as a Development Manager. She studied at the London College of Communication and completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. Kabakcı completed a curatorial fellowship at the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, supported by ICF (International Curators Forum). She has worked at commercial galleries, museums, and auction houses, both in the UK and Turkey, including Sotheby’s (London), The Albion Gallery (London), and Pera Museum (Istanbul). Open Space has collaborated with institutions such as Block Universe Performance Festival, Delfina Foundation, IKSV (Istanbul Biennial Foundation), SAHA Foundation, and SALT. Kabakcı ’s curatorial interest lies in creating immersive experiences and a wider dialogue in collaboration with multidisciplinary practitioners. She is also interested in theories and topics around diaspora, gender identity, collective memory, diaspora, and hospitality.