Heartbreak may seem universal, but the ways we value, experience, and express it are not. A University of Warwick historian is bringing together artists to explore the different ways we represent and respond to the pain of lost love.
For centuries, people have tried to capture what it means to have a broken heart. Dr Sally Holloway, a historian of emotions at the University of Warwick, studies the history of romantic love, tracing how people in the past valued, expressed, and tried to recover from the anguish of heartbreak.
As part of her project After Love, charting the evolution of lost love across the last 400 years, Dr Holloway's new exhibition taking place in October at OVADA in Oxford will explore what happens when love ends in the 21st century, asking what contemporary art can reveal about how our understanding and expressions of romantic pain have changed over time.
Dr Sally Holloway said: "The end of a romantic relationship is a uniquely devastating experience. Although heartbreak may seem timeless and universal, the ways in which people have understood and expressed it, and the range of feelings involved, have never stood still.
"By looking at how people represented romantic rejection, infidelity, divorce, or the death of a spouse in the past, alongside how artists respond to it today, we can explore not only what has evolved, but also what continues to connect our experiences of love and loss across time and space."
Dr Holloway's wider research looks at how the rituals of finding, expressing and celebrating love have shifted over time. Where couples once met at balls and theatres, relationships can now begin with a 'swipe right' on a dating app. The love letter has declined as texts, emails and emojis have become part of everyday romantic communication, while Valentine's Day has evolved from a folk custom into a major commercial celebration. Weddings have grown from comparatively low-key occasions - when couples might simply marry in their best clothes - into elaborately-planned and expensive events.
Dr Holloway's research also traces a longer shift towards greater individual choice in romantic relationships. The eighteenth century saw a cultural fascination with elopement, as the influence of families over whom people married began to decline and the idea of choosing a partner for love assumed greater importance.
Against this changing history of love, the After Love: Broken Hearts & Broken Bodies exhibition encourages us to think critically and creatively about what it means to be broken-hearted in the modern age. The exhibition will take place at OVADA in Oxford from 7-18 October 2026.
