Philippa Found
Artist. Writer. Curator.
Her lips were juicy, dripping words like red wine
Philippa Found is a feminist storyteller. Believing that the personal is political, she is an artist, writer and curator based in London whose practice merges all three forms with activist intent. Spanning performance, text, participatory art, interjections into public space, video and installation, her pratice uses storytelling as a radical act to counter the shame silencing that oppresses the hidden reality of women’s experiences, from desire and relationships to motherhood and the body.
Gathering and platforming intimate true stories in art form, and deliberately disseminating them in non-art public spaces, her work aims to make art more accessible and inclusive, reaching non-art audiences and representing the voices of those not normally represented in art and literature. She sometimes consciously collaborates with non-arts institutions, sometimes uses guerrilla strategies to bring her artworks to unexpected places. Her practice plays with boundaries of public and private, chance and self-imposed rules as a generative factor, collaboration, high and low art and structures of representation, collapsing heirachies of representation (who views and is represented across the arts), repeatition, obsession, embodying the ‘hysterical’ as a feminist act of reclamation, emotions as critical matter.
She is the creator of lockdownlovestories.com (May 2020 - ongoing) a participatory art project that allowed the public to anonymously submit their true stories of how lockdown had impacted their relationships. The artwork, comprised of over 1,500 true stories, was awarded a London Community Story Grants by the GLA and Mayor of London to gather insights from the stories to present to City Hall to inform post pandemic mental health policy.
Her art has been featured in The New Yorker, Stylist, Grazia, Independent, Mail Online, BBC Breakfast and ITV’s Lorraine, and has been exhibited in multi-site public exhibitions across the London High Street and on the London Underground.
Between 2006-2012 she had a contemporary art gallery, (ROLLO Contemporary Art) that specialised in representing women artists. She was the curator of the critically acclaimed three-part travelling exhibition series, The Body in Women's Art Now, (Critics Choice in Time Out London, the Financial Times, Modern Painters) which examined the themes that emerged in women’s body based art between 2000-2010, and sought to redress the under-representation of women artists in the UK at the time. The exhibitions included works by Tracey Emin, Cecily Brown, Nathalie Djurberg, Sigalit Landau, and Regina Jose Galindo alongside emerging artists and travelled to The New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge (home to Europe’s largest collection of women’s art). Philippa published a three-part non-fiction book, The Body in Women’s Art Now, with specially commissioned essays by renowned academics, which was nominated for the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Book Prize, 2011.
She has curated exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Selfridges, London, Dover Street Arts Club, and placed works by women artists into prestigous collections around the world.
Her short stories about teenage girlhood and young adulthood have been published by Galley Beggar Press, and prize listed for the Bath Short Story Award, The White Review Short Story Prize and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize.
She graduated with a Distinction in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2020 and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) Masters (Distinction, 2015). She lives and works in London with her two year old and six year old.
Philippa is represented by Imogen Pelham at Marjaq Literary Agency.