Nnena Kalu

b. 1966 · Glasgow, Scotland

She wraps fabric, cellophane and unspooled VHS tape into vast hanging cocoons, and in December 2025 she became the first learning-disabled artist ever to win the Turner Prize.

The life

Kalu was born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents and lives in London. She is autistic, with complex support needs and limited verbal communication, and since 1999 has worked with ActionSpace, a charity supporting learning-disabled artists, from a supported studio at Studio Voltaire, with Charlotte Hollinshead as her longtime studio facilitator. From the beginning, Hollinshead has said, her need to make was off the scale. In December 2025, at a ceremony in Bradford, Kalu won the Turner Prize, a landmark for supported studios everywhere.

The work

Enormous cocoon-like sculptures built by obsessive wrapping: found fabrics, cellophane and videotape wound into dense, suspended masses that colonise whole rooms, alongside vortex drawings of circling, compacted line, made systematically in pairs. The work runs on rhythm and accumulation, layer over layer, until the material becomes a body.

Why we love them

The art world finally caught up with what supported studios have known for decades. Kalu did not cross over to the mainstream; the mainstream crossed over to her.

Go deeper

• Nnena Kalu at the Outsider Art Fair
• Nnena Kalu on Wikipedia
• Tate, Turner Prize 2025
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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