The Fandangoe Kid: Painting Togetherness

Annie Nicholson is the Fandangoe Kid, a London-based print artist who (in normal circumstances) makes large-scale narrative driven pieces for the public realm. Her work seeks to smash taboos around complex subject matters such as loss, trauma release, mental health and gender constructs.

However, over the last few months, Annie has found herself “stuck” in Lisbon, waiting to install a new piece of work on togetherness at Arroz Studios. At a time when we are forced to find new ways to imagine, and enact, togetherness, Annie has started to hand-paint pieces to go directly into people’s homes. “Not only has it kept me alive financially, it has also kept me emotionally buoyant, a large part of the commissioning process being about sharing stories around the taboos of grief, loss, mental health and survival” says the artist. 

“This new work has been a challenge to my own practice, to experiment with a less rigid, structured form, moving away from digitally conceived pieces and into a space where image and text are more loosely expressed and yet more closely bound” states Annie. The works are inspired by shapes and images from Greco-Roman antiquity, Ettore Sottsass, and Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria. They reflect the colours from old Benetton magazines and Lisbon municipal palettes that she recalls from her childhood in the ’80s, and all together illustrate how she has been thinking about how this all relates to the text she uses; “which is straight from the heart”.

Annie’s new method of working has found its way into her installation work, which finally began on February 1st, after a month-long postponement due to lockdown. In collaboration with visual artist and writer Lara Haworth, she is painting the outside of a shipping container, The Container of Togetherness, using the fluidity of the hand-drawn shapes, columns, bright palettes, recurring patterns and integrated text Annie has been spending her days and nights working on in her lockdown kitchen studio in her Lisbon apartment. “It feels like this new way of working is here to stay” concludes the artist.

www.fandangoekid.com
@fandangoekid