Locations: 9th -22nd February

Camden Town Station: ‘Sometimes I lie’

London Bridge, Borough High Street: ‘The Hype’

7-11 Kingsland Road: ‘Fuck you Paul’

Clapham Common: ‘Magic’

Clerkenwell Road: ‘I Know’

American Car Wash, Great Eastern Street: ‘Period Sex’

Telephone Building, Tabernacle Street: ‘The Last Thing He Said’ (9th - 15th Feb)

New Cross Gate Station: ‘Him & Her’

137 Northcote Road: ‘Scared’

Great Suffolk Street, (23rd Feb - 8th March)

Confessions of relationships - stories of falling out of love, faking happiness on social media, and knowing the person you’re sharing your life with is not the love of your life - are coming to billboards across London this February in a subversive Valentine’s display of the messy reality of love.

These stories, submitted anonymously by members of the public, will be displayed across ten sites – reminding passers by that relationships aren’t always as happy as we’re imaging them to be. If Valentine’s Day triggers you, this is for you.

Interjecting peoples private confessions in public spaces, the exhibition collapses the binary of public and private, and the hierarchy of the traditional exhibition space. By using the city as a gallery, the exhibition seeks to embody the idea that art is for and can represent everyone - not just those traditionally represented in literature or on gallery walls. Platforming secret confessions in monumental scale, brings the realities of love that we don’t publicly share into the light, to normalise them and counter shame.

This is feminist art intervention and activist storytelling that reveals - not the glossy, curated highlights of love we share on instagram, but the darker more vulnerable reality we keep hidden.

Project creator, artist Philippa Found says, ‘I believe that one of the most radical, feminist acts we can do is to share our true stories - especially those narratives and perspectives that are silenced. When we give those space, we contribute to creating a more truly representative narrative. 

In my participatory project, Lockdown Love Stories and It’s Complicated, I gathered stories of love and relationships that we normally keep hidden. And this Valentine’s Day I am amplifying them, by blowing them up like monuments, presenting them super-sized on billboards across London. 

The stories we consume and the stories we tell ourselves are powerful. They shape how we see ourselves and our understanding of the world. At Valentines, the cultural focus is on love. 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. But that’s just one story. 

I wanted to put the other story out there on Valentine’s Day - of the hidden complexities of long term relationships, as well as confessions of the humiliations of contemporary dating - 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. 

These stories - the ones we hide, the truths we silence out of shame - are powerful and they deserve to take up space. I can’t wait to see them do that literally and metaphorically this February.’