Nnena Kalu’s sculptures are a dumpster diver’s dream

In 1967, the American artist Lee Lozano began making her Wave series, a collection of eleven monumental canvases made over a period of four years. Featuring lines carefully painted into wave-like grooves (similar to the grooves you might see on a vinyl record), Lozano would complete each of the works in one sitting: her first piece 2 Wave, taking eight hours, another, 96 Wave, lasting three days, exhausting herself mentally and physically in the process. Though rarely shown, when it is, Lozano’s Wave series hangs on black walls in one room, the shimmering lines creating a mesmeric optical shift, sightlines going bananas, colour becoming unfixed. Meticulous as they are, Lozano’s repetitive gestures betray an expressionistic spirit, her repeated mark-making turning what could feel hard, and cold, into something altogether more moving and profound.

A similar repetition is the name of the game in the work of Nnena Kalu, an artist whose work has spanned two decades, multiple residencies, and now a solo exhibition at a commercial gallery. Kalu’s is exhibiting for the first time at Arcadia Missa, just off London’s frantic Bond Street. Like Lozano, Kalu uses repetitive gestures in works that defy clear categorisation; the most recent of which are technicolour installations which hang suspended from the ceiling, gently twisting in the air as bodies move around the gallery.

Assembled through a patchwork of materials, the make-up of Kalu’s sculptures read like a dumpster diver’s dream: ink-black spools of VHS tape; drainage piping, tubes, plastic strips, rope, gauze, mixed fabric in bright pinks, greens and blues. The abstract sculptures are made up of layers of material, wound over again and again to create clenched fists of colour which hover like carnivalesque clouds.

In videos shot back in 2018, you can see the way Kalu creates her work, her winding and binding of these enormous forms becoming a performance in-and-of itself, as she methodically, and with a steadfast intention left uncommunicated to her audience, builds up her sculptures. Referred to as “overripe fruit” in the exhibition text, these forms feel more like bodily organs, entrails and guts spilling out inside the gallery. The sculptures seem to exist as an extension of Kalu’s own body, communicating to viewers an urgent and frenetic internal rhythm that is palpable as you weave amongst the works.

Hidden in a back room just behind the main gallery space are two of Kalu’s drawings. If you ask politely, you might be able to see them, the drawings helping make sense of Kalu’s practice. Using coloured pencil, Kalu has created dynamic, vibrant vortexes of colour, which seem to pull you in and spit you out as you look closer. They’re reminiscent of another female artist, that of the Victorian spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, who, like Lozano and Kalu after her, uses repeated gestures to create some of the earliest examples of (what could be seen as) abstract work. Known as ‘Spirit Drawings’ for the fact that Houghton created these works ‘unconciously’ during seances, these works – much like Lozano’s waves and Kalu’s sculptures – correspond to a shared need to communicate beyond language. It’s a shame then that Nnena’s drawings are not included in the exhibition, the bringing together of drawing, and sculptural form potentially providing a wider view of Nnena’s work, whilst also being a welcome addition to the gallery’s very white walls.

But it’s a triumph all the same. During a time when news of arts cuts are repeated so often it’s hard to imagine how a creative scene in this country exists at all, it’s a pleasure to see the work of a thriving artist who has been working with one of the UK’s most important art organisations: ActionSpace. Kalu has limited verbal communication, and has been supported by the charity since 1999, the organisation providing studio space for the artist to practice within and championing her work. It’s a small aside to a much bigger story: that of an artist making room for herself within the contemporary art world, creating work that feels as enormous and propulsive as the talent that thrums in her very bones.