Nnena Kalu

Shelley Davies: I always think of Nnena’s practice as working to her own innate rhythm, whether it's wrapping, whether it's knotting, whether it's drawing. It is always to the same rhythm. It's like listening to the sound of the sea coming in and out. It’s so beautiful seeing Nnena being in her element

Charlotte Hollinshead: I've been working with Nnena since 1999. ActionSpace and Nnena have developed together. From the very beginning it was clear that she was phenomenal and creatively really driven. Her work is really contemporary. It’s really exciting. It's really fresh It feels really relatable and it's just utterly wonderful now that her work is out there.

From the early days Nnena’s need to layer and to constantly build on whatever she's working on was present, so, it's been a case of sourcing materials that suit her need to build with a line. VHS tape is something we found early on and she completely adores it.

So much of her work is about this continuous line. She wants to take that line on a really long journey and she wants to build it and build it and shape it.

Shelley: It's so repetitive and rhythmic. The rhythm, it's such an important part of her work and I get so drawn into the rhythm. I love it.

Jes Fernie: I remember it really vividly,  Nnena working in a disused car showroom, making all of these incredible secreted sculptures, and what I really loved about the experience was that I felt so strongly that she was using her body to make these sculptures. So, they were dictated by the movement of her body. And I just thought, ‘Wow, this is ... this is incredible.’

Charlotte: She's completely in tune with her materials. It's absolutely beautiful to watch her working. She loves having the music on. She adores ABBA, a bit of Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder.

Joan Allen St Hill: She’s wrapping, she's dancing. She's painting, she's dancing. Whatever it is, she's dancing.  She loves it.

Lisa Slominski: When I first met Nnena the thing that really stuck out to me was her individual energy, her love for high fives, her amazing fingernails, and also incredible drive and passion

Luke Ottridge: She's taught me a lot about how to engage completely with your practice. It becomes about the work, about the joy of that process.

Sheryll Catto: She glows when she's making art and she really comes into her own when she's making art. She is a true artist.

Charlotte: Nnena’s relationship to her work has evolved in the most amazing way. Her early work was clusters of colour that she laid down in rows, and she did that for years. And then about 2013, she just suddenly stopped. She went straight into making these circular vortexes.

Sheryll: The other moment that Nnena’s work suddenly changed was when we did a project for Wandsworth Arts Fringe where we took over an empty shop and suddenly we had a lot more space and a lot more materials. And that was when the 3D work really took off, and she was binding around the security features and around the blinds and everything and by the end of it, there was this amazing city that she had created.

Charlotte: It's a very clear progression, a journey of scaling up from these sort of small little babies to these giant pieces which are far more complex.

As Nnena’s ambition grew, so has ActionSpace's, and so it's been this amazing development of journey together.

Nnena’s work would not happen without the support of ActionSpace. That is the reality, but that doesn't undermine her work. Her work is amazing. She is the artist. It's her work We're here as her facilitators to make sure that she can do what she needs to do

Lisa:  ActionSpace have such an important role acting as agents and as advocates for learning disabled artists and as support for curators and institutions to access and work with learning disabled artists.

Nnena's nomination of the Turner Prize is a watershed moment and incredibly important that a learning disabled artist with limited verbal communication has been nominated and is exhibiting on this level, like at Manifesta, being written about, being published about. But at the same time I think it's very important that we don't limit her work and her practice to a disability lens only

Charlotte: I feel like every big exhibition she does now brings out something new in her work. You can really see her practice moving forward. This is a huge moment not just for Nnena, but for the learning-disabled community across the UK.

Luke: The broader community is now catching up with Nnena and Nnena’s work.

Sheryll: Seeing Nnena and what she's doing is encouraging younger people that they can do it too. She is a role model. Where she is now is amazing and fantastic. She has a gallery, Arcadia Missa, who are taking her to Frieze and to Basel, and who knows where she'll go from here.