The morning after the Turner prize ceremony, the winner of the UK’s most prestigious art award, Nnena Kalu, is eating toast and drinking a strong cup of tea. Everyone around her is beaming – only a little the worse for wear after dancing their feet off at the previous night’s party in Bradford, and sinking “a couple of brandies” back at the hotel bar. I say hello to Kalu, offer my congratulations, and admire the 59-year-old’s beautifully manicured creamy pink nails. But the interview is with her facilitator, Charlotte Hollinshead, who has worked with the artist since 1999. Kalu has limited verbal communication skills; she has learning disabilities and is autistic.
As for Hollinshead, she is struggling to encapsulate the enormity of the win: for Kalu herself; for ActionSpace, the organisation that has supported her for 25 years; and for the visibility and acceptance of artists with learning disabilities within the wider art world. “It’s unbelievably huge,” she says. “I have to think back to where we started, when there was absolutely no interest whatsoever. I’d sit at dinner parties with friends in the art world. Nobody was interested in what I did, or who we worked with. We couldn’t get any exhibitions anywhere. No galleries were interested. Other artists weren’t interested. Art students weren’t interested. We have had to claw our way up from the very depths of the bottom.”
The previous night, in her speech on behalf of Kalu, she described the win as “seismic”. Kalu’s exhibition – which was tipped to win by Guardian art critic Adrian Searle – leaps out joyously at the Turner prize show at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. First the sculptures hit the eye – bulbous, bulging, shimmering multicoloured forms that snake and pretzel into themselves. They are built in layers of materials, wrapped and bound, bundled and draped in tape, ribbon, mesh, plastic. Videotape, one of Kalu’s favoured materials, dances and shimmers in a draught too faint to feel against your skin. Second, you are pulled into the drawings, which are all diptychs and triptychs, the pairs and trios near-echoes of each other. Whorls and spirals express the artist’s precise bodily range, the reach of her arm: you can feel how human they are. I’ve seen a film of her working and the regular sweep-swoosh of the crayon or pencil on paper in its rhythmic flow is something beautiful to hear. The spiral shapes she often creates are like cochleas or the deep interiors of shells, receding into a darkened blue-black vortex at the centre.
I’m curious to know how Hollinshead works with Kalu in the studio. She puts to rest one misconception: Kalu is not non-verbal. She tends not to speak in a large group, says Hollinshead. But one-on-one, absolutely she does. Hollinshead tells me that earlier, in the lift down to their hotel breakfast, they’d been discussing the playlist for a celebration that’s being planned in London to mark the win. Kalu listed off, Hollinshead tells me: “The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, Abba, Hot Chocolate.”
Kalu works between two and four days a week in the studio. “She’ll tell me what colours she wants, what materials she wants,” says Hollinshead. “It’s my job to get all that ready for her and lay them out. We always call it her ‘buffet’. She dips in and out with whatever she wants to work with.” Kalu has echolalia – she often repeats what is said to her – “but you give her space, you give her time, and then she says what’s on her mind,” says Hollinshead.
Kalu is very clear about when her works on paper are finished (many artists would give a lot for that particular sense of clarity). “The biggest part of my job,” says Hollinshead, “is watching her as well as listening and making sure that we’re always responding to her needs, that we’re not manoeuvring her and that we’re not pushing her in a direction, but we’re just sensitively ensuring that she’s got everything she needs to do what she wants to do.”
The big sculptures are a slightly different thing: “She has reworked loads and loads of pieces, building them up to the point now where they become completely gargantuan, unruly pieces of art.” Usually, for a show, she’ll finish them in the exhibition space, which she did in Bradford, sometimes upending what curators had expected. But, as Hollinshead points out, that’s pretty normal for any artist working on a show.
Hollinshead is clear about the long-term purpose she has had through the 30 years she has worked with ActionSpace, which, aside from Kalu, supports dozens of other artists with learning disabilities. She wants the artists to be seen maturely as part of the contemporary art world, in the mainstream of its institutions. For her, it has been a case of the art world catching up with Kalu’s capabilities, not the other way around.
“Nnena was ready for this quite a few years ago, but everybody else wasn’t,” she says. And if Kalu has finally breached what Hollinshead called, in her acceptance speech, “a very stubborn glass ceiling”, there are many who have been totally overlooked.
“We’ve got a whole storage unit filled with two decades of amazing art waiting for a massive ActionSpace retrospective. It breaks my heart that so many of those people didn’t have their moment in the limelight,” she says. “I’m so happy that this has happened while Nnena is all guns blazing, while she can really enjoy it. She does understand what’s happening. She really does – and it’s utterly, properly joyous.”
I’m intrigued by Hollinshead’s determination to break down the barriers to the art world, perhaps because Kalu’s work, her very way of being, poses a challenge to so much of what is considered important in that world. The art world is, paradoxically for a visual art form, very concerned with the verbal: with artists talking about their work, explaining it, despite the fact that doing so is often a struggle for the artists themselves and not especially illuminating for audiences.
“I have been told explicitly that Nnena wouldn’t be able to have an art career because she couldn’t conceptualise her practice and share it,” says Hollinshead.
The art world is also structured around questions of value and the market that seem not to impinge much on Kalu – she is obviously deeply invested in making her work, but it doesn’t seem as if she cares much about the outer trappings.
“She couldn’t give a toss about the art world,” agrees Hollinshead, “but what she does care about is putting exhibitions together. If we want to do more exhibitions, and for them to be really big and juicy and have a budget so she can let rip and do her thing, we need to play the game a bit. And I think last night we did turn the art world upside down a little.”
It has been a slow, incremental road to mainstream acceptance for Kalu. Hollinshead talks of the early years, when the only exhibitions available for her and other artists with learning disabilities were in the town hall and libraries in the London borough of Wandsworth, where their work together began. A turning point for Kalu was being invited to make a solo show as part of Glasgow International in 2018 (the city where she was born, of Nigerian parents, in 1966). “It was the first time curators and gallery directors and other artists came and saw the work,” says Hollinshead.
An exhibition in Hull followed – a solo show at Humber Street Gallery. Hollinshead laughs as she tells me about observing a man watching Kalu at work and then returning with his son, a student at Glasgow School of Art. “The man told his son: ‘Look: that is an artist. That is a life commitment to the work.’”
This year Kalu had her first solo exhibition overseas, at Kunsthall Stavanger. Hollinshead is still pinching herself. “We took a woman with really complex learning disabilities to Norway to install her solo show. I mean, that’s unheard of, for a UK artist. It really is groundbreaking stuff.”
Hollinshead is still wearing a rosette on her jumper that all team Kalu were sporting the previous evening – in its centre a cheery photo of the artist and the words, “Idol, legend, winner, whatever”. They are a quotation from one of the participants in a workshop that Kalu led recently. Hollinshead tells me her ActionSpace colleagues have been flooded today with messages from day centres and special educational needs schools. “I think the ripple effects of this are going to be massive,” she says. “Schools are doing art projects based on Nnena. All these students are wrapping and drawing; we’re being sent pictures by teachers.”
She tells me about a visit they made this week to a special educational needs unit at a mainstream school in Bradford. Kalu got stuck in with the kids who were making wrapped sculptures. Hollinshead pulls out a picture: it shows a little girl, with Down’s syndrome, embracing Kalu’s leg. Apparently she stayed there for the duration of the session. This week’s win for Kalu may be a watershed moment for the art world, a redefinition of what is regarded as valuable and worthy of its highest accolades. But maybe the real significance of it lies in what it might one day mean for little girls like this.
