After Love Mapping Heartbreak: A Creative Body-Mapping Workshop

Where does heartbreak live in the body? Join artists Jill Mueller and Julie Light for a playful, reflective art workshop exploring heartbreak through colour, shape, texture and the body.

About this event

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.

Practical details

Duration: 2 hours

Places: limited to 15 participants

All materials provided — no experience necessary

Some group sharing is involved, but participation is always your choice

Dates: October 9, 3–5pm OR October 10, 11am–1pm

Location: OVADA Warehouse

Tickets: £5/3 book via our website

Suitable for ages 18+

Accessibility
Please note that this workshop will take place in our Education Room, which is up a flight of stairs.

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.

Broken Hearts in British Novels
A talk by Dr Doug Battersby

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 heart break in classic novels.

OVADA Warehouse
Friday 9 October
5.30pm - 6.30pm
Free

After Love Mapping Heartbreak: A Creative Body-Mapping Workshop

Where does heartbreak live in the body? Join artists Jill Mueller and Julie Light for a playful, reflective art workshop exploring heartbreak through colour, shape, texture and the body.

About this event

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.

Practical details

Duration: 2 hours

Places: limited to 15 participants

All materials provided — no experience necessary

Some group sharing is involved, but participation is always your choice

Dates: October 9, 3–5pm OR October 10, 11am–1pm

Location: OVADA Warehouse Education Room

Tickets: £5/3 book via our website

Suitable for ages 18+

Accessibility
Please note that this workshop will take place in our Education Room, which is up a flight of stairs.

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.

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

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 poets 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+

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, heart break.

OVADA Warehouse
Friday 16 October
5.30pm - 6.30pm
Free