Research

Lisa is currently a PhD researcher at the Kingston University, School of Art in the Department of Critical and Historical Studies.

Working Project Summary

A Liminal Site: Cultural Intermediaries, Agency, Identity and Representation

This practice-based, interdisciplinary research examines how cultural intermediaries – including curators, critics and museums – interpret, mediate and represent artistic practices. Engaging with Nnena Kalu and her long-term studio context ActionSpace, the project explores how agency, identity and representation intersect within existing artworld frameworks. It addresses the limited critical discourse surrounding the curation of artists who, as in the case of Kalu, are learning disabled, have limited verbal communication, and whose practices are facilitated. 

Centred on Kalu’s practice, the project asks: How is agency fostered or constrained for learning disabled artists, particularly where communication and authorship operate outside normative verbal and textual frameworks, within curatorial and institutional processes? How might cultural intermediaries more responsibly engage with facilitation, support structures, and biography in ways that enable interpretation without reduction or overdetermination? How might the concept of the liminal site inform a more expansive, practice-based methodology for curatorial and institutional work? 

Using Kalu’s participation in, and subsequent win of, the 2025 Turner Prize as a central case study, the project examines how visibility is actively produced and negotiated through advocacy, interpretation, exhibition-making, media discourse, and institutional framing. 

In parallel, and in dialogue with this analysis, my practice-based research operates as a second, intersecting strand. As a researcher and curator who has worked with Kalu since 2018, my position is reflexively embedded within – and active in – the field under examination. I mobilise my curatorial projects, public programming, critical writing, and interpretive outputs as live sites of inquiry through which methods of speaking alongside rather than for artists are developed and tested as more accountable forms of cultural intermediation. 

Grounded in feminist, decolonial and disability theory, and drawing on María Lugones’ concept of the limen as a threshold space that unsettles dominant meanings, the thesis develops a liminal methodology for curatorial and interpretive practice. Emphasising relational agency, coalition, plurality and accountability, the project contributes new knowledge on cultural intermediation and offers transferable principles for more reflective, inclusive and just institutional practice.