Grief has no timetable, no script, and no agreed form. In No, no, Nothing I Can Think Of, Annie Frost Nicholson’s forthcoming exhibition at Wilton Way Gallery, loss becomes both subject and method — a way of navigating family history, buried truths, and a world that increasingly feels fractured.
The exhibition’s title is taken from Nicholson’s father’s final words, spoken when she asked if there was anything he wanted to tell her. That unanswered question sits at the centre of a body of work shaped by profound personal loss. In 2011, Nicholson lost her mother, sister and sister’s partner in a helicopter crash. Her father survived, only to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer five years later. This year marks the tenth anniversary of his death.
Grief has long been the engine of Nicholson’s practice, but this new work moves deeper into the terrain of memory and inheritance. In 2023, she discovered a previously unknown sister — a woman her father had fathered over sixty years earlier. “We look very similar,” Nicholson says. “She has the same laugh, the same gestures, even the same handwriting.” The revelation brought long-buried family secrets sharply into focus.
The paintings become a way of continuing a conversation that was never possible in life. Drawing on childhood and teenage ephemera, the works balance tenderness with a wry, sometimes tongue-in-cheek tone. Sun-drenched references to her parents’ life in Portugal sit alongside darker reflections on absence, rupture and the unreliable nature of memory.
Nicholson returned to Lisbon in 2020, immersing herself in places and sensations tied to her parents’ lives. Those experiences now resurface across the exhibition — not as nostalgia, but as fragments reworked through time. “So many artists make work about death,” she says, “from the perspective of those left behind.”
The exhibition also expands outward, connecting personal grief to wider social and political unease. Works such as The Past Is Another Country reflect a post-Covid, post-Trump landscape marked by collective disillusionment. Nicholson, who lectures at Chelsea College of Art, describes a sense of mass mourning for democratic values forged after the Second World War. “This isn’t just about my own grief,” she says. “It’s about the collective grief I think we’re living through — this feeling that we’re sleepwalking into something new.”
That concern with how grief is processed — or avoided — has also taken more unexpected forms. In 2024, Nicholson created The Fandangoe Discoteca, a mobile disco designed as a space to dance through existential pain. Presented at Canary Wharf and the Southbank Centre before touring Europe, the brightly coloured structure hosted DJ sets, meditation, yoga and “grief raves,” where participants danced to songs connected to lost loved ones.
While movement plays a role in mourning rituals across many cultures, Nicholson notes its absence in British grief traditions. Conceived in the shadow of the pandemic, the project responded to what she observed in both public life and her students: anxiety, isolation, and a loss of physical connection. “We were promised post-Covid euphoria,” she says. “It never came.”
Now living in south-east London with her partner, writer Lara Haworth, Nicholson continues to search for what remains after loss. No, no, Nothing I Can Think Of doesn’t offer resolution. Instead, it holds open the tension between memory and truth, nostalgia and survival — asking what we carry forward, and what we finally leave behind.
Annie Frost Nicholson, No, no, Nothing I Can Think Of, 5th March – 8th April, Wilton Way Gallery
