Past event: Visiting Artist Annie Frost Nicholson - Workshop and Public Talk - 26th & 27th March 2025
Annie Frost Nicholson (formerly The Fandangoe Kid) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose work seeks to smash taboos around the complexities of the human condition. Through a curious, colourful and considered lens, Frost Nicholson’s practice looks at what it means to be alive, and her preoccupation with life, death, grief and all their permeations follows her own devastating loss of family members twelve years ago, at the age of twenty-seven.
On 26.March 2025, she hosted an in-person workshop for early career researchers in arts, social sciences, cultural, and media studies at RMIT to explore the role of public engagement and creative practice in times of global permacrisis. Annie encouraged participants to critically reflect on how their research and creative work intersect with shifting socio-political landscapes, using visual, spatial, and narrative methods to highlight these dynamics. The session examines socially engaged research methodologies, exploring how collective and individual voices can be meaningfully amplified in public discourse. Through hands-on activities—such as model-making and mixed-media experimentation—participants considered how creative and research-based interventions can foster dialogue between communities, policymakers, and funding bodies. The workshop offered practical strategies for navigating the challenges of publicly engaged research while developing approaches that resonate across disciplines and create lasting social impact.
This workshop was followed by a booked-out free public talk on 27. March 2025 at RMIT. Annie shared personal experiences with loss and how this translated into her art. She discussed how we are living in ever-polarised times, where cancel culture rages and views are firmly embedded, with limited capacities to hold multiple truths and listen to one another. Annie illustrated through her own works how public art in 2025 can respond effectively to the complexities of the human condition, amidst global political chaos and persistent sense of loss. She thereby explored the role of contemporary public art and its ever-evolving relationship to ongoing contemporary crisis and societal change.
