One day, out of the blue, everything changed for Nnena Kalu. For more than a decade, she’d been making a certain kind of drawing, in a certain kind of way – repeated shapes, clusters of colour, all organised in rows. “Then, in 2013, she just suddenly started to go whoosh,” says Charlotte Hollinshead, Kalu’s studio manager and artistic facilitator, making big, swirling, circular hand gestures. “Everybody in the studio just stopped. She was somebody who had such a set way of working, for years and years and years, repeated over and over. For this to suddenly change was really quite shocking.” It was a shock that would set Kalu on the path to becoming the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner prize, as she was last month.
Her drawings are incredible: vast, hypnotic, swirling vortices of repeated circular marks on pale yellow paper. But it’s her sculptural installations that have garnered the most attention: huge cocoons made of found fabric and VHS tape, wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colourful knots. It was an installation of these heady sculptures at Manifesta 15, a pan-European art biennial held in Barcelona last year, that brought her to the attention of the Turner committee.
Kalu, who has limited verbal communication, was born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents, but moved at a young age to Wandsworth in London, where she still lives in supported care, not far from her studio at ActionSpace, a charity that provides space and assistance to learning disabled artists. She is autistic with complex support needs, and Hollinshead leads the team that has been helping to nurture her creative endeavours since 1999. “From the beginning, her need to make was off the scale,” says Hollinshead, who has been at Kalu’s side for almost 30 years.
It was at Hill House day centre in nearby Tooting in the late 1980s that Kalu first started exploring her creativity, before developing a more focused art practice, centred on drawing, when she joined the ActionSpace studio. But she was limited by space. “I always knew Nnena had potential for sculptural work,” says Hollinshead. “I held back on it slightly because we didn’t have the room or the budget. Nnena requires a lot of materials.”
It wasn’t until the council gave ActionSpace access to empty shops in 2010 that Kalu could really let loose. “For the first time, she had loads of room, so I laid out some materials, and she just blew our minds,” says Hollinshead. “She started making these cocoons, assembling them really quickly and attaching them all over the place. It was amazing to suddenly see somebody actually be free. She was glowing. The minute we opened that floodgate, there was no way to close it.”
Slowly but surely, bigger opportunities followed. In 2016 she showed alongside contemporary artists including Laure Prouvost at an exhibition in Belgium; in 2018, she took part in Glasgow International; 2024 saw her first commercial gallery show at Arcadia Missa in London. She’s just opened a major institutional exhibition at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger. It’s a career trajectory that any contemporary artist would aspire to.
Her work has echoes of Phyllida Barlow or Sheila Hicks: it wouldn’t be out of place in a Tate or Pompidou. “I think out of all the artists we work with, Nnena’s work stood out from the very beginning as really fitting in within contemporary art,” says Hollinshead. “It was always just significantly different in terms of its ambition and quality and approach. It always felt really fresh and exciting and immediate. So we have always insisted that she be seen as a contemporary artist, so that she doesn’t get sidelined as an outsider or disabled artist.”
The challenge is how to present Kalu’s art, and her disability, to an audience unused to dealing with both at the same time. When I first reviewed her work, in 2024 at Arcadia Missa, there was an insistence on her disability not being mentioned. “We were just starting to work out how we do this,” says Hollinshead. “How do we support an artist with limited communication, who isn’t in a position herself to say how she wants to be described, how do we honour her work? We were really worried that the learning disability would be fetishised, and that the focus wouldn’t be on the work.”
Kalu has since been given a bigger platform, and that’s now viewed by Hollinshead as an opportunity to talk about her experience rather than hide it away: “We have to celebrate this. She’s an amazing role model.”
Besides, in contemporary art, context is everything. You can’t talk about the three other artists nominated for this year’s Turner prize without talking about their backgrounds. Zadie Xa’s Korean heritage, Mohammed Sami’s youth in war-torn Iraq, Rene Matić’s experience growing up queer and mixed-race in Peterborough. These things are all integral to their work, ingrained in everything they do. Why would it be any different for Kalu?
“I feel that it’s as much a part of her identity as being a woman and being Black and being in her 50s and everything else,” says Sheryll Catto, ActionSpace’s director. “What we don’t want to get into is a forensic discussion about exactly what her disability is, because it’s irrelevant. We’re not engaging with the diagnosis or anything. We’re engaging with Nnena as an artist.”
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The ultimate aim is balance, an attempt to feel out how best to present the work. How do you focus on Kalu’s art without erasing her experience, and how do you talk about that experience without fetishising it? “I don’t know what the majority of our artists at ActionSpace have got,” says Hollinshead. “I don’t know any clinical diagnosis. And I don’t want to know, because they’re people. I know that Nnena adores Abba …”
“And dancing, and champagne, and cake!” Catto chimes in.
“And that’s more important than anything else. We’re focused on the joyous wonderfulness of all of our artists, that’s what we do.”
Hollinshead and Kalu are obviously close, with a relationship built on a huge amount of trust. “For a learning-disabled artist to succeed, it takes a team of people, and it’s a family approach, it needs a lot of love and support. I’ve spent a huge amount of time with Nnena in her studio, in nightclubs, in Nando’s. She’s like part of my family.”
Kalu is working on two huge, swirling drawings on my visit, making repeated, obsessive but precise marks that twist and turn over the paper. The two works echo each other, the same marks appearing across both, neatly mirrored. As well as champagne, Abba and cake, Kalu loves beautiful fingernails and proudly shows off some immaculate lilac gel nails while looking thoroughly unimpressed at my own chewed up cuticles. I ask Hollinshead how Kalu feels about the Turner nomination. “I think the enormity of the Turner prize is a very abstract idea, but she absolutely loves putting exhibitions together, and this will be another big exhibition. She will understand about the award situation, I think, when she gets to the award ceremony.”
This is clearly a watershed moment for arts and disabilities, a total shifting of the traditional art paradigm. “The nomination is phenomenal,” says Hollinshead. “It’s seismic. Someone said to me the other day, ‘It’s like someone’s just thrown a bomb into the Turner prize – and it is like that. A good bomb.”
