Annie
Annie is a multidisciplinary artist formerly working under the name The Fandangoe Kid.
In 2011 she lost her mum, sister, and sister’s partner in an accident in New York.
“Since the accident and the loss there’s been such a reckoning with my mental health - there’s been so much to work through. Because it dominated so much of my frontal cortex, I couldn’t make work about anything else.
There have been so many different things that have come out of me creatively at different phases of grief. In the beginning the feelings and the loss and the pain would just spill out of my mouth, it needed somewhere to go. I was filling sketchbooks with writings and drawings trying to release a lot of stuff.
Because I had so much traumatic loss, I wasn’t sure who to grieve for first. My dad was in the accident, but he survived. He survived for another five years. There was such a gap in communication between us when they died, I decided to start making work with him as a kind of platform for us to exchange grief.
There were many amazing parts to my dad, but he was also a bit of narcissist, so he was up for being centre stage and I managed to sell it to him that way. If I had said to him ‘can we just talk every night about my mum with no fixed outcome’ it wouldn’t have worked.
We made a book about my mum.
It did something powerful for his grieving process too - he said it enabled him to start talking and start reliving the feelings and memories that he’d packed away because there were so many people to grieve for.
“I honestly think the process of creativity is life changing. It can be about removing goals, about removing outcomes and pressure and just sitting with it.”
Later I made the film ‘Into Your Light’ which is about the connection with my sister. We had such a bond through music, through mix tapes, and through dancing. Every day that is the thing I miss most about her.
Dancing really helps me to prioritise what is most painful. It helps to create a bit of distance from the big surge of pain. It’s such a good way to just get yourself moving and bring some thoughts up and out. It’s a bit like putting all your pain and grief into a sieve - you shake it and what’s left is the stuff that feels most important to deal with that day.
It’s been interesting because in my grief process the voices that have come up first are linked to these anecdotes, stories, and big comical moments that very much sat with my dad and my sister who were vibrant characters.
Now I’m starting to look at my mum as a person who was a real consistent source of love and who has been very difficult to remember and talk about and write about and make work about because there aren’t these big crowning glory moments.
It’s taken me 10 years to get to because I think it involves a lot more intimacy and a lot more intricate pain.
I want to create something a bit more poetic, a bit more dream-like, I’m not really sure yet because it’s a real task to communicate a solid love that isn’t punctuated by powerful episodes.
The biggest task yet.”
In 2019 Into Your Light was screened at London’s Tate Modern and Manhattan Bridge in New York City.
Find out more about The Fandangoe Kid and her work: www.fandangoekid.com
Written by Faye Dawson