In conversation with Annie Frost Nicholson

“My work has always been trying to both process personal experience and try to speak to some universalities of our human condition and lived experience.”

 - Annie Frost Nicholson

Annie Frost Nicholson. Image credit Tara Darby

Annie Frost Nicholson is an artist whose work sits at the electric intersection of personal memory, public ritual and emotional release. Known for transforming private grief into bold, colour-saturated experiences - from stitched paintings to micro-discos - Annie’s practice creates space for collective healing without losing the rawness of its origins.

Her upcoming exhibition, And my mother said to me, enjoy your life, opens this October at They Made This in London. The show brings together a new series of large-scale paintings, stitched works and dreamlike compositions that explore memory, loss and the objects we carry through life - literally and emotionally.

We caught up with Annie ahead of the show to talk about grief, joy, ritual, and why storytelling is at the core of everything she does.

And my mother said to me, enjoy your life is such a tender and evocative title. What does this phrase mean to you now, and how did it shape the emotional terrain of this new body of work?

These words come from the brilliant musician Beverly Glenn Copeland, who I was lucky enough to see at Hackney Empire last week. I discovered his work through Paul Flynn when he came on my radio show, at a time when I had also discovered that I had a sister I had never known about. As so much of my work has been about navigating loss, to discover a new sister having lost a sister was surreal. it was the first song my ‘new’ sister Nova and I bonded over. We are a blended family and our mothers have been absolutely essential in making us all both resilient and sensitive, gentle but nobody’s fool. This is the balance I seek to communicate in the new work. 

Image credit Tara Darby

So much of your work lives in the tension between grief and joy. Why do you think you’re drawn to that space in-between - not quite one or the other?

I’m always thinking about how to hold the two, my dear friend calls it ‘walking the tightrope’ between pain and joy and this is how it feels to have lost a lot very young in life but also to know that I’m still here, in the world, having and wanting to remain present and look ahead. It’s the most unimaginable grief some days followed by some which are better than I could have imagined 15 years ago, when none of these life defining events had occurred. Everything becomes amplified, more acute.  It is an eternal push/pull and I’m always reworking and reimagining how I forge ahead and what I take with me, what I leave behind. 

You often use objects as entry points into memory - whether in paintings or installations. Is there one object in your life that continues to hold emotional weight for you?

My mother’s rings. I used to wear them every day even while sleeping and now I wear them when I really need to conjure her up or an extra dose of strength. The last time I put them all on was for the Grief Rave at The Southbank Centre and one of the garnet stones fell out mid dance, only to be found by one of the participants and handed back to me, amongst a massive crowd at the end. They seem to stay with me and return to me even when momentarily lost!

It's like putting on an armour and I feel I have her with me. I need to paint them!

Image credit Tara Darby

You move fluidly between painting, stitching, public installations and more. How does your process shift across those mediums? Do you feel like you’re speaking different emotional ‘languages’ with each?

I love this question. My work has always been trying to both process personal experience and try to speak to some universalities of our human condition and lived experience. When I’m painting, I’m building a narrative experience in a not dissimilar way to when I’m designing for the public, but the process is so different. It is absolutely all consuming, and I move through so many worlds, past and present and back again, it’s a total sanctuary for me. I feel lucky that I can do that, it’s often a chance to commune with people I’ve lost, usually with music, hence the often-embroidered song lyrics in the paintings that facilitate the entry into these worlds. Then, at the end of each day, I’ve learnt enough over the years to be able to step out of this lovely and constructed dream world and back into my life, without too much disruption.

The Fandangoe Discoteca created space for people to dance through grief - it was joyful, wild, and deeply human. What did that project teach you about how people process difficult emotions collectively?

It has been an honour and a privilege to hold so many stories as a team, from bereavement to climate and political grief and all things in between. The Discoteca was such a pleasure to make, principally because the team we built to make this so effective in the public realm was just so very special. These people are more than colleagues now, they are family. It’s because of this team that we could invite and safely hold so many difficult emotions collectively and we have really learnt so much about human resilience, about never judging what someone might be carrying. 

Carly Attridge at The Loss Project, Taro Gragnato at K67 Berlin, Norman Wassmuth the lighting designer, Linett Kamala, DJ and first female to ever play Notting Hill Carnival and Everton Bell-Chambers of Housewarmers Collective are all key parts of the Grief Rave and the Discoteca and without them the project could not have reached the public as profoundly as we have. So, from the outset, we have worked collectively in order to be able to safely hold the many complex emotions that would come to the surface through talking about and dancing through experiences of loss. 

Colour plays a huge role in your work - bold, unapologetic, and often dreamlike. How do you think about colour emotionally? Do you have colours you return to when words aren’t enough?

Another brilliant question! I feel this really goes back to earlier comments about seeking the space between grief and joy - when I think back to much of my early life, colour played such a big part. My parents would use colour as part of their identity in a big way, at home and in what they wore, often outlandishly, and it has always held joy and humour for me as a result. When they moved to the South of Portugal when I was in my late teens, the brightness got turned up even more, at home and sartorially and I have very strong memories of the light there, it’s emotional in itself because it is unlike any other and so associated with long tables outside, all eating and laughing together. I have a strong love of kitsch too from my Blackpool grandma, lots of inedible things made with food dyes, clashing colours and dress ups as a child, delicious!

Image credit Tara Darby

You’ve created work that lives in galleries, on dance floors, and in city streets. What’s next for you - is there a project, idea, or feeling you’re excited to step into next?

I’m currently working on a new installation combining my longstanding public art practice with my painting practice for 2026. It feels like an exciting hybrid of forms, drawing on past experience but much more hands on for me in the making and a chance to open up a painting dream world for participants.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

A book or text that’s stayed with you?

Monumenta by Lara Haworth

What’s one ritual that anchors your day?
Transcendental meditation, life changing!

Last song that made you feel something?
Beverly Glenn Copeland, La Vita

A place you return to, creatively or spiritually?

The hills in Alentejo and the Lower East Side, NY

What does healing look like to you?

Knowing that pain lessens over time. People I love around my table

Website: anniefrostnicholson.com

Instagram: @anniefrostnicholson