PHILIPPA FOUND’S LOVE CONFESSIONS TAKE OVER LONDON FOR VALENTINE'S

"Don’t believe the hype, here’s another side of the story,” says artist and writer Philippa Found on Valentine's Day. Across London, her oversized confessions - “half-way between shock and super-relatable” - about love, regret and longing interrupt the holiday's usual romance narrative to remind passersbys that love is rarely neat.

Photography courtesy of The Books

It's Valentine's Day. I'm slightly hungover, having drunk a little too much red at a gallery dinner last night. I'm squinting at a huge pink and red billboard in Shoreditch, asking me a question I did not expect to be faced with at 10AM on a Saturday morning: "How can you be ‘just friends’ with someone you wanted to have period sex with?” Across the city, many others are being faced with equally raw statements: "Sometimes I lie in bed with my boyfriend and think about my ex." "I've spend almost half of my life with him. I love him. I do... but I know he's not the love of my life."

These oversized fragments form part of artist and writer Philippa Found’s billboard project, It's Complicated: Collected Confessions of Messy Modern Love, which expands her long-running archive Lockdown Love Stories into public space. What began during the pandemic as an anonymous digital platform has grown into a body of over 1,500 submissions and stories gathered under conditions designed to suspend shame.

Lockdown Lovestories, 2020, photography courtesy of artist

The project began in 2020, when lockdown abruptly reorganised intimacy and isolation into a single shared condition. Found, then studying fine art at Chelsea College of Arts, was already working around questions of love, shame and female experience, but the pandemic sharpened her sense that emotional reality was happening privately, almost invisibly. “I thought it would have a massive impact on dating and relationships,” she explains. One statistic in particular stuck with her: online searches for “why am I dreaming about my ex?” had reportedly surged during early lockdown.

The scale of that yearning contrasted sharply with what she encountered on social media, where people appeared composed, productive, and emotionally intact. The gap between private feeling and public performance became the conceptual trigger for the work: “I wondered what else we were experiencing in our love lives that we were not sharing,” she says, suspecting that shame and taboo were keeping those stories invisible. "So I built a website and put an open call on the site asking people to tell me what was going on in their love lives, and in return I would publish their story anonymously on the site and on Instagram."

Lockdown Lovestories, 2020, video courtesy of artist

In typical lockdown improvisation, the project spread through low-tech means. Found began chalking the website URL across London parks during her daily walks, hoping curiosity might translate into participation. She expected a handful of responses; instead, submissions arrived almost immediately. “On day one I received three stories and I was hooked,” she recalls. Posting them online prompted a wave of responses (“me too,” “I feel so seen,” “I could have written this myself”) signalling a genuine collective recognition. Over roughly two years the project accumulated around 1,500 submissions, transforming from a lockdown experiment into what she describes as a global community bound by a shared sense of emotional honesty.

Photography courtesy of The Books

That logic led naturally to the billboard format. Enlarging anonymous confessions to monumental scale was, for Found, a way of refusing the hierarchy that typically separates art spaces from everyday life. The leap from online archive to monumental billboard is just as much an escalation of scale but a shift in artistic register. She uses scale as a method to "shout the thing we don’t normally say,” she explains. The move into public space reframes these private thoughts by granting a visibility usually reserved for brands or political messaging. Instead of selling a fantasy, they interrupt the visual economy of the city with something far more down to earth: a reminder that most people’s romantic lives look nothing like the polished narratives promoted every Valentine’s Day: "At Valentines, the cultural focus is on love." notes Found. "If you’re single, or have recently gone through a break-up or are in a relationship unhappily, Valentine’s Day can be triggering. We project stories of happiness on other couples, which is fed back to us in the performative edits shared on social media. We consume these and conclude we’re missing out on a happiness others have."

Photography courtesy of artist

There is also a deliberate refusal of the gallery model embedded in the decision. Found previously worked in the commercial art world and knows, from experience, how exclusive those spaces can feel. The project’s ambition has always been to reach voices beyond the self-selecting audiences of institutions. “I wanted to reach as wide a demographic as possible,” she says, arguing that the high street offers a far broader cross-section of people than the white cube ever could. "

Found's practice sits in a recognisable lineage of language-based conceptual art. The media release itself explicitly places the project in dialogue with figures such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger (Found's white-on-red text in her Lockdown series makes explicit reference to Fruger's work), artists who turned public language into a site of critical confrontation. Yet Found’s project also marks a clear shift away from the conceptual austerity traditionally associated with that lineage. If Holzer’s truisms were slippery aphorisms designed to expose ideological mechanisms, Found’s texts arrive already saturated with affect by nature of being confessional rather than declarative.

Jenny Holzer, Abuse of Power, 1983

The distinction becomes clearer when read alongside Gordon Hughes’s influential essay on Holzer’s work, Power's Script: Or, Jenny Holzer's Art after 'Art after Philosophy', which traces how language art negotiated authorship, power and meaning in the aftermath of Conceptualism. Hughes notes that critics often treated Holzer’s practice as text stripped of authorial voice: a strategic erasure that produces what he calls a kind of “authorial suicide,” where language appears to speak without a stable speaker. The result is language that resists fixed ideological meaning until it meets a particular context. Holzer’s statements, Hughes argues, only acquire force once materially situated (on a marquee, a billboard, or a condom wrapper) where the context articulates the meaning, rather than the language containing it intrinsically.

Found’s billboards operate through a related mechanism, but with a crucial inversion: the voices are technically anonymous (no authorship is attached to individual lines) yet the emotional ownership feels unmistakably present. The anonymity here is a social technology rather that a structuralist erasure of the author, a way of enabling confession instead of dissolving voice.

Photography courtesy of artist

This alters the dynamics of language and power. Hughes writes that Holzer’s statements are deliberately “free-floating, polysemous and inherently ambiguous,” only becoming ideological once context fixes them. Found’s texts are also free-floating, but their ambiguity lies less in politics than in intimacy. A breakup line enlarged to billboard scale shifts from private embarrassment into public recognition and, in doing so, collapses the boundary between individual experience and collective emotion.

We are all familiar with the capitalist horrors of Valentine's Day, although Found is keen to confront the emotional ones too. "I wanted to put the other story out there on Valentine’s Day," she explains."The hidden complexities of long term relationships, the less than perfect feelings, the ambivalences, the fear and longings, as well as the painful almost humiliations of break ups and heartbreaks – things that are both shocking but so relatable, to say to people, this Valentines Day, Don’t believe the hype, here’s another side of the story -– and make passers-by who might feel triggered or shamed by Valentine’s Day reflect on the stories they are telling themselves."

In that sense, the project also resonates with the history of feminist language practices that treated testimony as political form. Found’s insistence that these stories deserve to take up space connects directly to the tradition of using public text to challenge whose voices are granted visibility. "I wanted the stories to sit half-way between shock and super-relatable." she says. "To evoke both: wow I have never heard anyone admit that before and yet, that is exactly me."

Photography courtesy of artist

After reading thousands of submissions, Found noticed that certain emotional patterns returned with surprising consistency — not necessarily dramatic events, but lingering states people rarely admit aloud. One recurring theme was unresolved attachment: “Longing for exes… that it’s normal to not get over something/someone,” she says. Instead of closure, many stories described learning to live alongside loss. She also points to “shame for being single but wanting to be in a relationship,” a tension intensified by contemporary capitalist self-optimisation culture, where people feel pressure to appear fulfilled alone. Sexual anxiety appeared in multiple forms too, the “worry we’re not having enough sex, or too much sex, or too empty sex” revealing how intimacy often becomes a measure of self-worth.

Photography courtesy of The Books

Another dominant thread was exhaustion. Dating fatigue, she says, emerges again and again, alongside the emotional toll of disposable dating culture and situationships that leave people feeling stuck between judgement and longing. Even friendship breakdowns appeared as unexpectedly painful. What surprised her most, perhaps, was how common ambivalence proved to be: “not wanting to be in the relationship but staying in the relationship for a myriad of reasons.”

Hughes’s reading of Holzer suggests that language art reveals how meaning emerges only through context, through the meeting of text and world. Found’s intervention extends that proposition into the emotional register of contemporary urban life. What gives the project its particular force is that nothing here resolves. The statements don’t offer advice or moral clarity, only fragments of lived contradiction: desire alongside doubt, intimacy beside shame, somewhere between conceptual language art and a public diary written by a city to itself. Found's work doesn't monumentalise love so much as its complications: the uncertainty that sits beneath the social-media gloss, the romantic mythmaking, the daily dissonance between what we perform and what we endure.

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It's Complicated: Confessions of Messy Modern Love brings together more than 250 anonymous true stories of love, dating, breaking up, being single, hooking up and exes to show us what love and relationships are really like and can be purchased here.