She is the softly-spoken Glaswegian who has now ascended to the pinnacle of the world of British contemporary art.

Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur has won the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition Alter Altar, which includes an installation of a car with a giant doily on it. 

Born and raised in the city, Kaur says she and artist who makes ‘with the slurry of life’, who was raised amidst 'betrayal, secrecy and banished outsiders’. 

Which is an odd way of saying she comes from Pollokshields, but as her art has focused on the malleability of cultures and the way familial lodestones can echo down through generations, it’s as good a prism as any to view her sudden appearance among the British art world’s elite.  

Kaur’s father Hardeep ran a hardware store - Hardy’s hardware in Cathcart Road - but her family’s forbears originally hail from India.  

Her great-grandfather came to Scotland in the 1950s and settled in the city, giving up his turban for a flat-cap and his Sikh beard for a 'well-trimmed moustache’ 

She describes herself as “somewhere in-between" British, Indian, British-Asian, Glaswegian, Punjabi and “something else entirely new”. 

Jasleen Kaur is announced as the winner of the Turner Prize 2024Jasleen Kaur is announced as the winner of the Turner Prize 2024 (Image: David Parry/PA Media Assignments) In an interview given to the British Council back in 2016, she said: “These multiple identities provide me with a richness that I often draw upon in my work. 

“Everybody has a different idea of the point at which somewhere, once foreign to them, becomes home. 

“My gran on my mother’s side said that although she’d had children in India it was only when she gave birth in Britain that she felt she could call it home, as her child was a British citizen.” 

As a child Kaur and her family used to take trips to Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde, travelling from Glasgow to Largs for the ferry. 

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Trips like these in the family car became part of the Turner-winning exhibition, with a red Ford Escort – her father’s first vehicle – making up one of the one of the installations of her prize-winning show. 

The various displays explored in the exhibition explored religious identities, politics and history, and made heavy use of different sounds, embedded into the exhibition by way of worship bells, Sufi Islamic devotional music, Indian harmonium, and pop tracks.  

Pictures of her family were stained with Irn-Bru, a reflection of the Scottishness which steeped her traditional Sikh upbringing.  

Kaur, who was born in 1986, graduated from Eastwood High School and went on to study silversmithing and jewellery at Glasgow School of Art in 2008, before moving to London to study at the Royal College of Art. 

Irn-Bru stained family photos were part of the exhibitionIrn-Bru stained family photos were part of the exhibition (Image: NQ) She remembers her school years fondly, particularly her secondary school art teacher, who inspired her to follow her creative instincts.  

Kaur told The Times: “At Eastwood High School we had this incredible art teacher, Mrs Hempstead. She was the coolest teacher and human. If you were “disruptive” at school she’d be the one to take you in.  

“She was one of those adults who saw you and treated you like a human. She’d have music on, there’d be biscuits with tea; she’s the reason I went to art school.” 

Now living in London, the city of her birth remains a constant presence in the background of her life. 

She said: “I love returning to Glasgow on the train. There’s something about when the train starts to get quiet from Carlisle, getting over the bridge into Glasgow Central Station and seeing the clock you used to meet your pals under. It brings back a flood of memories.” 

Kaur will receive £25,000 for winning the Turner Prize. Other Previous winners have gone on to become household names, including Grayson Perry, Damien Hirst and Steve McQueen.  

The artist, who used her acceptance speech to call for an end to the war in Gaza, has previously spoken of the way art can transcend borders and the identities placed on new generations by their ancestors.  

Jasleen Kaur Jasleen Kaur (Image: Turner Prize)

She said: “There is this beautiful quote by a jazz musician called, Asher Gamedze he sees tradition as people grappling with their present. I just love what that offers, like a kind of freedom to tell the story differently.  

“There's bits of history that aren't mass produced and there's bits of my history that isn't printed and on the walls of our houses they tell me a different kind of version of my lineage or my ancestry that is more plural. 

“My singing practice today, I'm trying to salvage the compositions and the songs that come from that more plural form of devotional worship where Sikhs and Muslim rabbis would play and compose and sing devotional music together. 

“That time when things were more plural that gives me a sense of hope for how to live now.”