‘Nina Kahlo was ready for this – no one else was ready’: How her Turner Prize win shook the art world | Turner Prize

TThe morning after the Turner Prize ceremony, the winner of the UK’s most prestigious art award, Nina Callow, was eating toast and drinking a strong cup of tea. Everyone around her was delighted – only slightly worse after dancing with their feet at the previous night’s party in Bradford, and drinking “a couple of brandies” in the hotel bar. I say hello to Kalo, offer congratulations, and admire the 59-year-old’s beautifully manicured cream-pink nails. But the interview was with Charlotte Holinshed, who has worked with the artist since 1999. Callow has limited verbal communication skills; She has learning difficulties and is autistic.

As for Holinshed, she struggles to embody the enormity of the win: for Callow herself; to ActionSpace, which I have supported for 25 years; And to highlight and accept artists with learning disabilities in the wider art world. “It’s incredibly huge,” she says. “I have to think back to where we started, when there was no interest at all. I would sit at dinner parties with friends in the art world. No one was interested in what I was doing, or who I worked with. We couldn’t get any exhibitions anywhere. No art galleries were interested. Other artists weren’t interested. Art students weren’t interested. We had to work our way up from the bottom.”

The previous night, in her speech on behalf of Callow, she described the win as “seismic”. The Callow exhibition – which was won by Guardian art critic Adrian Searle – is happily hopping into the Turner Prize exhibition at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. First, the sculptures struck the eye – swollen, swollen, shimmering, multi-coloured shapes resembling snakes and pastries in their own right. They are built on layers of materials, coiled and bound, bundled and wrapped with tape, tape, mesh, plastic. The videotape, one of Callow’s favorite materials, dances and flashes in a stream too faint to be felt on your skin. Secondly, you are drawn to the drawings, which are all diptychs and triptychs, the pairs and triptychs being closer echoes of each other. The whorls and spirals express the artist’s subtle physical scale, the reach of her arm: you can feel how human they are. I watched a film of her work, and it was beautiful to hear the sound of crayon or pencil moving across paper in its rhythmic flow. The spiral shapes they make often resemble shells or the deep interior of shells, tapering off into a dark blue-black spiral in the center.

I’m curious to see how Holinshed works with Callow in the studio. It puts to rest one misconception: Kalo is not nonverbal. She doesn’t tend to speak in a large group, Holinshed says. But she does it individually. Holinshed told me that earlier, as they walked up to the hotel for breakfast, they had been discussing the playlist for a celebration planned in London to celebrate the win. Callow came back, and Holinshed told me: “The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, Abba, Hot Chocolate.”

Calo works two to four days a week in the studio. “You’ll tell me what colors you want, what materials you want,” Holinshed says. “It’s my job to prepare and prepare everything for her. We always call it ‘her buffet.’ She indulges in whatever she wants to work with.” Callow has a vocal resonance — 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,” Holinshed says.

Callow is very clear about when her works are finished on paper (many artists would give much for this particular sense of clarity). “The biggest part of my job is to monitor her and listen to her and make sure that we’re always responding to her needs, that we’re not pushing her or pushing her in one direction, but sensitively ensuring that she has everything she needs to do what she wants to do,” Holinshed says.

Large-scale sculptures are something a little different: “She reworked huge amounts of pieces, building them up to the point where they are now completely unruly, huge pieces of art.” Normally, for a show, you finish them in a gallery space, which is what she did in Bradford, sometimes upending what the curators expected. But, as Holinshed points out, this is very normal for any artist working on a show.

Holinshed is clear about the long-term goal she has been pursuing throughout the 30 years she has worked with ActionSpace, which, along with Callow, supports dozens of other artists with learning disabilities. She wants artists to be seen maturely as part of the contemporary art world, in the mainstream of its institutions. For her, it was about the art world keeping up with Callow’s abilities, not the other way around.

“Nina was ready for this a few years ago, but everyone wasn’t,” she says. And if Callow has finally broken through what Holinshed, in her acceptance speech, called “a very stubborn glass ceiling,” there are many more who have been completely overlooked.

“We have an entire storage unit filled with two decades of amazing art waiting for a massive ActionSpace retrospective. It breaks my heart that a lot of these people never got their moment in the spotlight,” she says. “I’m so happy that this happened while Nina had her guns blazing, when she can really enjoy it. She understands what’s going on. She really understands what’s going on — which is absolutely exhilarating.”

I am fascinated by Holinshed’s determination to break down barriers to the art world, perhaps because Callow’s work, and her way of being, pose a challenge to much of what is considered important in this world. Ironically, for a visual art form, the art world is very interested in the verbal: artists talking about and explaining their work, although doing so is often a struggle for the artists themselves and not particularly salient to audiences.

“I was told explicitly that Nina would not be able to have an artistic career because she could not visualize and share her practice,” Holinshed says.

The art world is also centered around questions of value and market that don’t seem to affect Kahlo much—she’s clearly deeply invested in the making of her works, but doesn’t seem to care much about external trappings.

Holinshed agrees: “She couldn’t look at the art world, but what she cares about is bringing exhibitions together. If we want to have more exhibitions, for them to be really big and interesting and have a budget so they can do their job, we need to play the game a little bit. And I think we turned the art world on its head a little bit last night.”

It has been a slow and gradual road to mainstream acceptance for Kalu. Holinshed talks about the early years, when the only exhibitions available to her and other artists with learning difficulties were in the town hall and bookshops in the London borough of Wandsworth, where their work together began. The turning point for Kalu was her invitation to perform as a solo show as part of the Glasgow International in 2018 (the city where she was born, to Nigerian parents, in 1966). “This was the first time curators, gallery directors and other artists had come to see the work,” says Holinshed.

This was followed by an exhibition in Hull – a solo show at the Humber Street Gallery. Holinshed laughs as she tells me about noticing a man observing Callow at work and then returning with his son, a student at the Glasgow School of Art. The man said to his son: Look: Which He is an artist. Which It is a life commitment to work.

This year, Kahlo held her first solo exhibition abroad, at the Kunsthall Stavanger. Hollinshead is still pinching herself. “We took a woman with very complex learning difficulties to Norway to install her solo show. I mean that’s unheard of for an artist in the UK. It’s really groundbreaking.”

Holinshed still wore the rose on her jacket that all of Team Callow had worn the night before — at the center of which was a cheerful photo of the artist and the words “Idol, Legend, Winner, Whatever.” These are quotes from a participant in a recent workshop led by Callow. Holinshed told me that her colleagues at ActionSpace have today received letters from day centers and special educational needs schools. “I think the ripple effects of this will be huge,” she says. “Schools are doing art projects based on Nina. All these students are wrapping and drawing, and the teachers are sending us pictures.”

She told me about a visit they made this week to the special educational needs unit at a mainstream school in Bradford. Kalo got stuck with the kids who were making scroll sculptures. Holinshed pulls out a photo: it shows a little girl with Down syndrome cradling Callow’s leg. It appears that she remained there for the duration of the session. Callow’s win this week may mark a watershed moment in the art world, a redefinition of what is considered valuable and deserving of the highest honors. But perhaps its true significance lies in what it might one day mean to little girls like this.