Talk about the art of grieving! Graphic artist Annie Frost Nicholson lost several members of her family in a tragic helicopter accident in New York in 2011. This changed her approach to creativity which was her outlet to process her grief. She channeled her own experiences into pop-up art projects to help people process their grief and mental health issues. As an antidote to the isolation of the pandemic, she joined with Carly Attridge, founder of the grief support charity, The Loss Project https://www.thelossproject.com/. Her first touring art project, a customized ice cream van. People were invited to talk with one another in and around her brightly colored graphic designed van decorated with labels like, “Global Anxiety,” “Grief Wallops,“ and What’s Your Flavor?” while eating a scope or two of ice cream. “The idea was to facilitate spaces for dialogue, rather than come up with a prescriptive idea of what it is to grieve.”
Next, continuing to use her own art to work through trauma, she teamed up with architects at Caukin Studio, and decorated a custom built 1960’s disco- inspired kiosk “Fandangoe Discoteca” to host “grief raves.” “We found people had moved on from being really desperate to talk to wanting to shake it out,” she said.
Looking at the pictures of Frost Nicholson’s work and reading her story brings a smile to the face of this grief advocate. I especially appreciate that she is doing this work in the heart of England, the country from which many of us in the U.S. inherited our uptight, stoic habits of not expressing our grief.
Having featured a space for talking and a space for dancing, if I may be so bold as to suggest a direction for Frost Nicholson’s next work–how about putting the two elements together and designing a space for talking and moving! In InterPlay, the art-based practice that I teach and perform, we have an improvisational form called Dance/Talk. Just like its name, you move first, then talk, and repeat that process three or four times in the presence of witnesses. As we’re learning more about the grieving brain, I’m sure we’re accessing and igniting the spiral connections between our brains’ hemispheres. An artist friend here in Pittsburgh, Gail Langstroth, a tri-lingual poet and eurythmy performer herself told me, after viewing our performance of these forms, “Moving and speaking when done together, are the Alpha and Omega of aliveness.”
This seems a fitting next step in Frost Nicholson’s body of work. Her website states, “After losing so many family members…navigating the non-linear world of grief and loss through her practice became her direct line of survival and her body of work has grown within and around her experience of being alive in the world.” I would say that aliveness is the goal and reward for grieving well. Check out how she is using art for this noble purpose. https://www.anniefrostnicholson.com/
