“Lockdown Love Stories is a participatory art project with storytelling at its core because I believe that one of the most radical things we can do - in a culture that shame silences our realities with the perpetuation of false ideals through the gloss of social media - is to tell our true stories. In lockdown when we were physically disconnected from each other, spending more time online, lost in the continual scroll, comparing our reality with someone else’s filtered curation, I believed that this was more important than ever. The premise of Lockdown Love Stories was: don’t show me what a curated edit of love looks like, tell me what the unfiltered reality feels like.
I believed that the impact of lockdown on people’s relationships would be significant and that lockdown would have a paramount effect on mental health, causing heartbreak, loss and longing, and as a side effect of this: shame. I believed that while lockdown is isolating what’s more isolating is shame & the belief that you are alone in your emotional experience.
By sharing these true stories anonymously I hoped to normalise the messy reality of love and relationships and demonstrate, through the commonality of these experiences, that whatever anyone was going through, they weren’t alone, making people feel less isolated, less ashamed and more connected through recognition of the universality of our shared emotional experiences in response to the pandemic.
In April 2021, Philippa Found and Lockdown Love Stories was awarded the London Community Story Grant by the Mayor of London’s office to bring insights of people’s lived experence of the pandemic to London’s City Hall to inform post pandemic Mental Health Policy.
The power of art and storytelling is that it can make a difference in the world (beyond the confines of an art gallery or the literary world). For this project to be awarded the London Community Story Grant & contribute to shaping post pandemic mental health policy is testomony to the impact that our true stories can have.”
For more information on the London Community Story:
