‘Her need to make is off the scale’: why Nnena Kalu’s Turner prize nomination is a watershed moment for art

The Glasgow-born artist makes huge cocoon-like sculptures out of found fabric and videotape. We meet the team who helped her become the first learning-disabled person to make the award shortlist

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.