Events
After Love Exhibition Launch with an introduction to the project by Dr Sally Holloway
A radically inclusive exhibition and series of public events on romantic heartbreak - a project by Dr Sally Holloway
What happens when the excitement, happiness, and comfort of romantic love have departed, leaving a trail of emotional devastation in their wake?
What does it mean to suffer from a broken heart?
The answer to this seemingly simple question is much more complex than we might imagine, and changes substantially over time and space. After Love: Broken Hearts & Broken Bodies is a group exhibition which invites artists to share their creative responses to the experience of romantic heartbreak, relationship breakdown, and survival strategies in the aftermath of romantic endings.
Both emerging and established artists are encouraged to submit works into this radically inclusive exhibition where all eligible works are shown - reflecting the ubiquity of heartbreak as an emotionally devastating experience which can affect us all across age, experience, and background.
This exhibition is part of a major project by historian Dr Sally Holloway, which charts the evolution of romantic heartbreak as an embodied emotional experience over four centuries of history.
Funded by a Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship from the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the project partners with a range of organisations including Oxfordshire Mind; the Oxford Visual Arts Development Agency (OVADA); the visual artists Jill Mueller and Julie Light, and the Poetry Pharmacy.
Ultimately, After Love urges us to think critically and creatively about what it means to be broken hearted in the modern age.
Body Mapping Workshop with artists Jill Mueller and Julie Light
This workshop invites you to explore heartbreak not just as an abstract idea, but as
something that can be felt physically and imagined visually.
We’ll start with a short introduction to Dr Sally Holloway’s After Love research
project, exploring what historians and researchers have discovered about the
experience and expression of heartbreak over time.
We’ll then experiment together with colour, texture, shape and mark, creating a
shared visual “legend” for feelings and sensations associated with heartbreak —
from longing and desire to grief, shame and anger.
Using this as a starting point, you’ll be invited to create your own A2 body map,
combining paint, drawing and collage to explore where and how these feelings might
inhabit the body.
You don’t need to be able to draw or have any previous art experience. The
emphasis is on exploration rather than artistic skill.
You can work from your own experiences, from literature, stories or historic ideas
about heartbreak, or simply from your own imagination. There is no expectation to
disclose anything personal, and you can share as much or as little as you wish.
Come and discover what heartbreak can look like through the lens of creativity.
Key info
Location: OVADA Education Room, upstairs
Duration: 2 hours
Tickets £8/5/3
All materials will be provided
No experience necessary
Limited to 15 participants
Some group sharing is involved, but participation is always your choice
Please note, this event is suitable for ages 18+
Accessibility
This event takes place upstairs in our Education Room.
There is a flight of approximately 20 wooden stairs with a handrail to get to it.
The closest fully accessible toilet is at Courtyard by Marriot Hotel, a 3minute walk from the gallery.
Although we have a range of ticket pricing, please get in touch with us at afterromanticlove@gmail.com if pricing is a barrier to you attending the workshop.
Broken Hearts in British Novels, a Talk by Dr Doug Battersby
Broken Hearts in British Novels
A talk by Dr Doug Battersby (University of Leicester)
Literary history is littered with broken hearts, from Shakespeare’s Ophelia to Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw. In this talk, historian of the novel Doug Battersby will explore how British fiction has reflected changing cultural understandings of “literal” heartbreak—belief that the heart as an organ of circulation is physically affected by intense emotional experiences, sometimes fatally.
We will focus on the 19th century, when scientists and doctors began to seriously question longstanding belief in the “emotional heart.” Growing scepticism of the heart’s connection to the emotions is reflected in novels by major writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, some earnestly insisting that grief and romantic loss really can kill, and others satirising literal heartbreak as a comically antiquated belief.
We will conclude by reflecting on how recent cardiological discoveries about “broken heart syndrome” prompt a reassessment of the realism of representations of heartbreak in classic novels.
OVADA Warehouse
Friday 9 October
5.30pm - 6.30pm
Free
Accessibility
This will take place on the ground floor of the gallery.
Due to the age of our building, unfortunately our toilets are not fully wheelchair accessible. However, there is an accessible toilet available approximately 3mins walk from us at Courtyard Marriot Hotel.
The Poetry Pharmacy Pop-Up: Prescriptions for Matters of the Heart
The Poetry Pharmacy comes to OVADA for a special one-day pop-up dedicated to matters of the heart.
Part apothecary, part bookshop and part poetic first-aid station, the Poetry Pharmacy prescribes poems for all manner of emotional ailments. For After Love, the focus will be heartbreak in all its forms: love lost, endings, longing, loneliness, recovery and beginning again.
Drop in for a short one-to-one poetry consultation, where one of our Poetry Pharmacists will listen to what ails you before prescribing a poem and a handwritten prescription to take away. Alongside the consultations, our pop-up dispensary will offer Poetry Pills, books and other poetic remedies to browse and buy.
No appointment necessary.
Age: 14+ for the consultations
The pop-up dispensary itself is open to everyone.
OVADA Warehouse
Sunday 11 October
12–3pm and 4–6pm
Free
Accessibility
This will take place on the ground floor of the gallery.
Due to the age of our building, unfortunately our toilets are not fully wheelchair accessible. However, there is an accessible toilet available approximately 3mins walk from us at Courtyard Marriot Hotel.
You Can Do It With A Broken Heart: Reading, Writing, Picking up the Pieces
Heal your heart with the help of You Can Do It With A Broken Heart, a raw, relatable and wise new anthology of poems both classic and contemporary.
Join us for a beautiful, bittersweet bouquet of poetry, conversation and comfort, as anthologist Ana and poet Esther Lay share poems old and new from the collection and explore how words can help us make sense of heartache, hold onto hope and begin again.
OVADA Warehouse
Sunday 11 October
3pm - 4pm
Free
Suitable for audiences 13+
Accessibility
This will take place on the ground floor of the gallery.
Due to the age of our building, unfortunately our toilets are not fully wheelchair accessible. However, there is an accessible toilet available approximately 3mins walk from us at Courtyard Marriot Hotel.
Artists Talk by Dr Lindsey Holmes
Historical and fictional heartbreak is brought to life through everyday items of dress such as shoes, gloves and stays in Dr Lindsey Holmes’ tactile artwork, which she explores in relation to the exhibition’s theme of romantic heartbreak.
Her practical PhD outcome is a stitch-by-stitch replica of a dress worn by the honourable Mary Graham at the time of her death from consumption in 1792. Mary’s marriage was a love match, rare at this time, and her husband, Thomas Graham devoted his life to improving her health and was ultimately left devastated by her death.
She will also discuss The Needle is Always at Hand artwork, which was shown in Keats House and explored the doomed relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, in which consumption once again resulted in heartbreak.
Finally, The Snow Queen Retold, a collaboration with poet Kaddy Benyon, first shown at The Scott Polar Museum, in which the classic Hans Christian Andersen story is retold, and the relationship between Gerda and the robber girl is developed into a love story, filled with, lust, obsession and once again, heartbreak.
OVADA Warehouse
Friday 16 October
5.30pm - 6.30pm
Free
Accessibility
This will take place on the ground floor of the gallery.
Due to the age of our building, unfortunately our toilets are not fully wheelchair accessible. However, there is an accessible toilet available approximately 3mins walk from us at Courtyard Marriot Hotel.
It Is Otherwise For Us: Writing into Heartbreak
Saturday 17 October 2026
It Is Otherwise For Us: Writing into Heartbreak
A poetry writing workshop
Join Maya and Phoebe from the Oxford Poetry Library for a relaxed, explorative afternoon of poetry. Looking at two poems that span the tenth century to present day, we'll consider how experiences of heartbreak resonate and shift through time, holding the universal and personal side by side.
You'll have plenty of time for writing, with guided prompts helping you to explore seeing heartbreak from new perspectives.
OVADA Warehouse
Saturday 17 October
2pm - 4pm
Free - Booking required
Suitable for age 16+
Accessibility
This will take place on the ground floor of the gallery.
Due to the age of our building, unfortunately our toilets are not fully accessible. However, there is an accessible toilet available approximately 3mins walk from us at Courtyard Marriot Hotel.
Cabinets of Curiosity
The Cabinets of Curiosity project brings together teams of History undergraduate students at the University of Warwick to co-create fun displays inspired by Renaissance cabinets of wonder. Each year, teams select a story, an individual, or a moment in history, put together a fantastic object collection, and organise their display. The finished cabinets are then open for all to view and wonder at in FAB, Floor 3. This year's project will be on the theme of HEARTBREAK and will begin in November 2025 - email sally.holloway@warwick.ac.uk to secure your place now! To browse some of the wonderful displays created in previous years, you can take a look at the project website here.
The Scents of Love and Loss
This event will explore the significance of smell in the formation and breakdown of romantic relationships. It will involve short talks by the Principal Investigator Dr Sally Holloway, and Dr William Tullett, Lecturer at the University of York and expert in the history of smell and the senses. Participants will be invited to make scented collages in a creative workshop led by the visual artists Jill Mueller and Julie Light, who create award-winning pieces on health, the body, identity, and what it means to be human.