Annie Nicholson Transcript

Hello, I’m Syreeta Challinger, and welcome to Leaven - the podcast for conversations on hope, love, life and everything in between.

Hello, and welcome to Leaven and today’s conversation is with Annie Nicholson, also known as FandangoKid.

I came across Annie’s art whilst going through some of my own challenging times and it helped me greatly.

As an artist, her work in print is in large scale and found in public spaces for all to access. She works across the Atlantic in both New York and London and her work challenges taboos around complex emotions and topics such as death, mental health, trauma, grief, love and gender constructs.

SC: “Today’s episode is incredibly powerful as Annie’s work stems from her own personal trauma in the loss of her entire family. The beauty and Grace with which she navigates it all is astounding and I’m beyond thankful that she gave me her time - AGAIN - after our first recording failed.

“This is an incredible conversation and testament to Annie’s spirit, and humanity.

“Here is Annie the FandangoKid:

“So we are chatting because obviously we have had the privilege of chatting before, but for those of you who are new, do you want to tell us about yourself and what you do?”

AN: “Yeah, so my name is Annie and I make work under The FandangoKid and I am a visual artist and I kind of yeah largely work in the public realm. A lot of my work is about smashing taboos involving loss and trauma and associated mental health and I have kind of been working towards trying to create a platform for these kinds of things to become more of a daily conversation and a lot of this has been motivated or directed or steered by my own sort of experience largely of traumatic loss, so that is me.”

SC: “Powerful stuff it is, because I found you when I was going through the deepest and darkest of - I guess you would call it ‘living grief’ because I did not have a death experience - but I guess I had a traumatic experience and I think the grief and the loss of experiences can run parallel and I found, I think a friend sent me a picture of one of your work in New York when she was on holiday, because I was racking my brain thinking how did I actually find you, and it was a couple of years ago and I can’t remember the exact words, but I will make sure that I will share with everybody in a few minutes.

But just everything about it just hit me, it was almost like I had been sucker punched because you feel it and you get this too. And at that point I had no idea about your background and what led you to creating but it just resonated and I felt connected to you as an artist and as a human and that is why I was so eager to speak to you and share your story because obviously I don’t know you. You have been so kind giving me your time, but it is quite a story which led to you creating where you are now. Would you mind sharing how it all began?

AN: “At that time when you would have seen the work in New York, I had gone back to New York, it was probably 2018, and I have been going back to New York for kind of like the last 10 years following the loss of my family in an accident in the East River in 2011 so it is kind of coming up to 10 years now and New York has been a place has been a place which has really broken me because of everything which has happened there and the multiple losses we experienced as a family, and it has been really important to me and has been a really special place for our family or was a special place for our family, so it is really important to me I guess to reappropriate that space or take back some power from something which bas been lost or has been snatched from me and revisiting this space of deep pain and trying to open it up gently, so I have been kind of revisiting the city for years and years - each time with a slightly different approach.

AN: “So my family were killed in an accident at my sister’s 40th birthday, and the whole family other then my oldest sister and I. The whole family went over and I actually had a ticket to go but I had to work very last minute so it was Sonia’s 40th and my parents had gone and my sister’s girlfriend, they had gone from Sydney, and they took this helicopter ride, which is really kind of unusual thing for them to do but they did and they were quite reluctant to take it, and I don’t know why they did, but there was a mechanical failure and everybody in the helicopter except for my dad died. My dad had terminal cancer at the time so he was already really unwell so there was a really heavy irony that we were kind of expecting his death and preparing ourselves but he survived that accident and then lived another five years and then did eventually die of the cancer he had been diagnosed with, so yes it has been a pretty heavy 2011 to 2016 and pretty awful and then there was a little cherry on top with all of the politics which were happening in the world.

“I think my dad died the day Donald Trump got elected and just at the start of Brexit so it was like ‘oh right this is a real epic year.’

SC: “Gosh, right I mean I know this from you and I have read it and obviously we have spoken about it before about it but every time I hear it, my whole body just fills with an adrenaline and love mixture all at once for you because it is just absolutely remarkable that you have got some distance from it, but it is just the most unthinkable thing to go through, and yet here you are having taken the pain and turned it into a gift to ease everyone else’s pain - it is quite something.”

AN: “I think it is really interesting in an abstract sense, if somebody had said to me - so I was 27 when this all happened - when the accident first happened in New York in 2011, and if someone had said to me ‘okay when you’re 27, these huge losses are going to hit you and your life is going to unfold’ then I would have said probably like most people ‘well I don’t think I am going to survive this’ and I think your body just does remarkable things so it has been a real, very much in the beginning, maybe for the first couple of years, a real day-by-day - certainly in the first couple of years - real basic survival with everything just being stripped back to a very simple way, and then for me I felt like I had kind of entered a new life, it was like the innocence a d the freedom of my old life sort of stopped there and I entered something brand new which was just about learning to live in the world again without everything that I had come from, and there was such a kind of heaviness in my brain in terms of trauma because I actually just did not know who to grieve for first and there was just so much going on and your brain and your body just seem to work in some sort of amazing tandem in some sort of syncronisity because you let certain amount of pain in in any given period so as not to overwhelm you because it is just painful enough just to get up or whatever - so it has been, I guess, a whole new life of relearning and reintegration into the world and a whole new episode and it has only been maybe these last couple of years, I remember clearly when it first happened it was so sort of fresh and new but also sort of familiar but from this sort of an unethical past, and it was kind of like this part of my old life up to the age of when I was 27 where I was remembering parts of my self a d I was really kind of excited and overwhelmed that I had had the opportunity to work through grief so much that I am able to integrate some elements of I guess what I would call my first life into this sort of chapter - this post loss chapter - and that bas been really nice and overwhelming.

SC: “It is just incredible really, and I just want to break it down a little bit because there must have been days where you had to create your own ways of how you can get through and - you mentioned everyone has their own rituals as a way of survival and you talk about how for you it was through dance, can you tell us how that evolved for you in the early days?”

AN: “I had always really liked dancing with my sister, and we had always had a connection through mixed tapes and music, and just sort of dancing around the house and growing up in the countryside, and I just kind of remember that was a real escape anyway - I just kind of like really wanted to get out of the countryside and into the city for this big vibrant life and that was a kind of way to - what I imagined life was like as a teenager - and when Sonia died, that really became a direct line to kind of connecting to her particularly and music and that release for a small moment.

“For a small moment you can kind of step out of the heaviness if what is gong in inside of your brain that you are carrying and you can just release things and just be in your body a bit which I just think is a really different way of just shaking out pain and a really important way of shaking out trauma as well - I am not saying that with each dance you sort of release it, but it definitely sort of does something - I think I have described this to you before where running was also another big one - where you put all of this sort of crap and heaviness that is really weighing heavy on you into a sieve - this giant sieve - and then go for a run or a dance and at the end of that experience, the sieve has just shaken out and so the things that are left are the bug clunky things which you might want to build upon on any given day, because I just think it is impossible to handle it on any given day.

SC: “Yeah, pain and the grief dies tend to manifest itself physically if you are not processing it, so body work and movement are really important and as humans we tend to try and intellectualise things, when actually you just need to feel it.

AN: “Without even realising it in the last six months, I have really fallen in love, so this opportunity to really experience a strong love amongst the living or with a living person, this sort of chance to really build something, whereas this sort of insistent monologue with the dead which is kind of - because it is more of a monologue now - because I have just been so exhausted and slept and slept and slept and it feels like shedding more layers and shedding stuff and releasing stuff, and I realise how much I have been storing and I do think that is about trauma.

SC: “Absolutely, I think we mentioned this before how the body keeps the score - that incredible book - and it is true, it will be buried deep down somewhere, even when you think you are done - the work is never done to sort of process this stuff.

AN: “That is the thing, I do think it is really important to say that this is work, you know, because our other ways that we approach trauma - like in the case of my dad - when we lost my mum, and my sister and my sister’s partner, that he sort of knew that he had a fine amount of time to live, and he approached the trauma and the grief very differently, and actually I feel very grateful and lucky that I had much more time unravelling me to actually do the work and do the process because I think he was so caught in the heavy trauma of it that the last few years of his life were to survive.

SC: “I am just in awe of you are able to speak about it beautifully, I guess we are never able to know what we can get through until we are faced with it, but my goodness it has been a hell of a lot for you to get through, what role did friends and community people around you play a d lead you into the creative projects that you are working on?”

AN: “I think initially, it was just about keeping alive, so to be honest there are some surprises and some incredible people who have really stepped up and have really become like my family over the last decade really but on the whole the people who have always been there for me, are the same people who have always been there for me, and are there for me now and vice versa, and in terms of your strong relationships and friendships around you, but in terms of a creative outlet, that did not really come for a few years, but I think my friend has always been nurturing that but then when in 2015, I had always been making work but had not been showing anybody, so it was always a release but it was not publicly, because again I thought I have always got to do this work because I don’t want to put this raw stuff into the world, one because I have not really made huge sense of large parts of it yet, and two, because I think you have a moral sort of responsibility to have done some of the work before you are putting potentially some really extreme things out into the world without any sort of cushioning for people, because so many people have this pain and this trauma in whatever ways, in whatever their particular stories are, so in 2015 I met Tara who I made Into Your Light with and I watched another film she had made with another magazine and it really moved me, and I found out who made it and I just sent her an email just to say ‘I love what you have made’ and I shared a bit of my story and it turned out we lived really close to each other in Hackney, so we ended up meting for coffee and that meeting turned into a good few hours of chatting and by the end of it we decided to make a film which was Into Your Light and that was the first real opportunity to really dig deep into my guts and really bring that out into an art form into an environment which I really trusted the team and the bind between Tara and I became really strong and is still going and we are about to make our next film so it to9 a while.

SC: “I was about to say it has been 10 years since that incident, but correct me if I’m wrong but you threw yourself into other work rather then art work to get you through, because you were working in a creative role but you were teaching, is that right?”

AN: “Yeah, so I had moved back from Australia in May 2011 and I was going to marry this guy there, and I had been in this long-term relationship, and it was not working so I had left that and I came back to London and started doing a PGCE at Goldsmiths in a kind if way of doing a bit if teaching while I was making a bit of work, and then the accident happened, and I remember so I was in New York for literally about five weeks and one by one, because it did not happen straight away, my mum, and my sisters partner was in a coma, my sister died instantly, but it was this thing unfolding of watching people die in front of you and a really traumatic experience in New York and I came back and my mum had had a full recovery which is why I came back to London and then there was a sort of incident in the hospital - a negligent incident - and she died, not because if the accident but because of something else involving so because we had been through this five-week process of rehabilitation, I had left to come back with the understanding that she would come back the week later to London and we had been through this absolutely awful time and just salvaged this ‘my mum will survive it’ and then something went wrong in the hospital and she didn’t and and I don’t want to go too much into that but it was just so, the pain of that was just unbelievable, so I remember thinking it was like a thursday that my mum died, no it was a Saturday, so I was in the midst of doing my PGCE, and I just thought it was a real ‘do or die’ situation, so on Monday morning I kind of just got up and went into Goldsmiths and I just kind of carried on and I did not miss a day, because it was kind of like ‘if you stay in bed, then you are just never going to bet out, and so just, and I had this time frame for kind of keeping it together and I finished the PGCE, and did two years of teaching and then I stopped but in that first year of finishing the PGCE I had this sort of ache in the afternoon until 4pm where you just have to keep it together, and after that it’s ok, you can lose it and you can just totally unravel and it really gave me a structure, and I remember one day, and I had not told anyone this, it was just a bit of private structure for myself, and then I remember one day someone in the school said: ‘oh we have a staff meeting’ and it is going to go on until about 430 - and I just absolutely lost it - in a really frightening way and that happened a couple of times in various different circumstances over the first couple of years and I just think I would describe it as ‘literally just keeping your head above water’ because when the smallest thing came to interrupt that, I would just unravel.

SC: “Well I guess it is just one of those things that when everything else is just so wildly out of control, you do everything else in your power to just focus on what you can.”

AN: “I think the same, in hindsight with having been through so many different stages of grief and yes you can call them rituals - whatever you want - whatever is helpful to you as you go through this grief, yeah running became a big one, but as you say because you need to have this form of your life, for me I realised it was running marathons and really getting into it.

When my dad was dying, I felt such a control for what was going on in my life, and such a sadness, and such a deep underbelly of sadness that I was running 15 miles a night - literally every single night - and I think that’s is when there is a difference between ritual and obsession, because I think it is really important to mention how overwhelmingly feeling of control becomes.

SC: “It is finding the measured balance which is so hard when everything else is tumultuous, and I can see how from one extreme to the other, being human, my god.”

AN: “I think it took me a long time to realise what was happening, and I think it is important to mention but you have all sorts of agencies stripped from you and you know you can really go self obsessively into some things which give you some sense of control.

SC: “I’m feeling thus physically also, our stories are so wildly wildly different, but then there are so many other things you are saying where I am just like ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ But obviously I have no idea how it feels for you to have gone through all of this, but there is just an element of wanting to recognise that even though you don’t understand what someone is going through, you still recognise it is still painful and say that ‘you are there, and you see them.’

“There are a lot of ways not to handle it and I think grief and loss and death is such a taboo in our society that I don’t think it should be because it is all just a part of life isn’t it?

AN: “Yeah and I think what you have said about the points we can connect over the terms of grief really indicates that obviously everybody’s story is really different even if it was the exact same set up, we still internalise and deal with things differently and I think there is a universality about grief and in our own experience and I do think there are these macro kind of ways of connecting with people which can be really helpful for people who are in different stages of grief and we were saying before about the ‘do or die’ situation, but what that led to was thus real kind of urgency and necessity to talk it out and feel it out and push through it because I just really wanted to kind of because the only other real option was giving into it and not really surviving it.

SC: “It is work and there is no escaping from it, there is no hiding from it - your pain - yourself and everywhere you turn, if you don’t deal with it in that moment, then it will come back and get you in some other way like you can’t hide from yourself especially when going through something like this, everybody knows from a really young age that that is okay and realising that whatever has been lost in all of it, that there will be good days and bad days and ups and downs but just those minute movements towards yourself and what you’re feeling will get