Philippa Found
Period Sex,13.11.2020, from the project lockdownlovestories.com
Anonymously submitted true story
Lockdownlovestories.com is a participatory art project by Philippa Found that allows anyone to anonymously submit their true stories of love, dating, relationships & break-ups. The artwork, comprised of over 1,500 stories, aims to resolve the shame many of us feel & normalise the less spoken about, messy reality of love.
Philippa Found is an artist, writer and curator based in London. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art, her multi-disciplinary practice, spanning performance, spoken word, text, video, and long form writing, explores the messy reality of female experience, examining female desire, shame, the body and motherhood.
Often endurance based, and obsessive in its process, the work engages with notions of the hysterical, embodying this as a feminist act of reclamation, while also exploring and challenging the limits of the artist’s physical and mental capacity in the making process – whether through repetitive physical acts or by pushing memory to its maximum. Found deliberately exhibits her art in non-art public spaces as a way of collapsing the boundaries of public and private and reaching non-art audiences with her workShe is the creator of Lockdown Love Stories (May 2020 – ongoing) a participatory art project conceived in Covid-19 lockdown, which allowed the public to anonymously submit their stories of how lockdown had impacted their relationships. The artwork, currently comprised of over 1,500 true stories, has featured in The New Yorker, Stylist, Grazia, Independent, Mail Online, BBC Breakfast and ITV’s Lorraine. It has been exhibited in multi-site exhibitions on the London High Street and London Underground.
Between 2006-2012, Philippa was the director of ROLLO Contemporary Art, London, a commercial gallery representing women artists. She has curated exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Selfridges, London and the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge and published a three-part non-fiction book, The Body in Women’s Art Now, nominated for the Feminism and Women Studies Book Award, 2011.
Throughout her career, Philippa has worked passionately to redress the balance of representation of women in the arts, and believes in storytelling as a radical, feminist act against the oppression of shame silencing female narratives.
