Cake and early hip-hop together at last in Beccy McCray's new work

From baking shows to bespoke office biscuit deliveries, the UK seems to be in the grip of some kind of sweet-tooth mania right now, which makes Beccy McCray’s new work very timely. She has explored our clamour for cakes in two new projects which reinvent the birthday staple in very different ways. For an upcoming show at east London’s Residence Gallery, Beccy has created six “baketivism posters” having iced the names of some of the most significant hip-hop tracks of the 1980s and 90s onto some delicious-looking cakes, bringing together the radicalising agenda of early rap with what she sees as the contemporary reinvention of crafts like cooking.

Concurrently, her Resist sculpture is on show in an outdoor space in St Leonards on the south coast of England. In a gated wasteland amid an area of some considerable social deprivation, she has built a huge, garish pink cake designed to represent “accelerated consumer capitalism and artificiality within a society collapsing under its own weight.”

So next time you’re filing your face, try and look at your sweet treats like Beccy might.