Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst.
Her drawings are even more intense - whirling whorls of fierce spiralling marks on coloured paper, that double back on themselves over and over - but you can only just spy them in the office in the back of the gallery.
But it’s not as objects or images that Kalu’s work is the most interesting. Kalu has ‘limited verbal communication’; creating these sculptures and drawings is an act of expression, a feverish striving for visual communication, a plea for language. The objects are a symbol of that endeavour, but to see them is to be spoken to, reach out to, and brilliantly communicated with.
