Art & Culture

An Edible Family in a Mobile Home – An art installation you can EAT has opened in Manchester

The figures inside are made of cake and biscuits.

Daisy Jackson - 6th March 2025

People made of cake, a bathtub filled with more cake, wallpaper covered in icing – this is the newest art installation to open in Manchester, and it’s literally good enough to eat.

This is An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, a restaged piece of art that was a major feminist artwork in the 1970s.

Artist Bobby Baker has now recreated this incredible piece of work outside the Whitworth Gallery, alongside the Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.

Step inside this prefabricated home and you’ll find different figures in each room, each one of them in some way edible.

From the father watching television in his armchair (he’s made of fruit cake) to a coconut cake baby in a crib, to a Garibaldi biscuit teenage boy lying in a bathtub of vegan chocolate cake, to a floating teenage girl made of meringue, visitors will be able to eat their way through the sculptures.

Each cake inside is made by beloved Levenshulme bakery Long Boi’s Bakehouse too, and having taken a bite of the very first slices – they’re all delicious.

The space used to stage An Edible Family in a Mobile Home is plastered floor-to-ceiling in mid-70s newspaper and magazine pages, advertising everything from secretarial jobs to cigarettes, and documenting landmark moments like the death of Elvis Presley.

These wallpaper cuttings have then been decorated with icing doodles.

There are also old radio stations playing in the kitchen, and 70s comedy on the TV.

Bobby Baker’s work was first created in her prefabricated East London house in 1976, then wasn’t seen for almost 50 years until she restaged it at the Tate Britain in 2023.

And now it’s Manchester’s turn, with this impressive, playful piece in residence at the Whitworth art gallery until 20 April.

During which time, the artist’s cake ‘family’ will be steadily eaten away by the public.

This installation is possible thanks to public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Bobby Baker said: “Originally I wasn’t overtly considering the work as ‘feminist’, however over the years – and having had children and now grandchildren, I have come to realise that unpaid domestic labour is an incredibly undervalued part of life.

“It is fundamental to how the human world operates – how we look after each other and care for our children and stay healthy.

“However, domesticity and the work it requires still have words like ‘menial’ attached to it. In 1976 when people came to see Edible Family in what was my actual mobile home, they could contemplate who plays what domestic roles and why – and restaging this now, I feel that this work is still very much relevant today.”

Elsewhere in the Whitworth, ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’ features over 100 women artists and celebrates their often-unsung contribution to British culture.

An Edible Family in a Mobile Home is free to visit and is open from 7 March until 20 April,

See more HERE.

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Featured image: The Manc Group