A small painting hangs in my childhood home living room. It is filled with dots - lots of tiny white, brown, red, blue dots in a shape that I have always thought looks like an “M”. The painting is a little world on its own and I remember getting lost in its patterns and forms as a child. I later find out it was a gift given to my parents by an East German painter friend of theirs. Through his work I got a glimpse into his world, even though I never met him, and I likely added my own stories to his.
My favourite way to enjoy art is in a home, like Jim and Helen Eade’s Kettle’s Yard or Henry Moore’s Garden or the homes of friends and families. Galleries are OK and have the ability to show art you’d never be able to buy and thought provoking work but I generally find them draining - the bright lights, on your feet all the time, dense text, so much to look at in a short space of time, constant temperature, white, white walls.
No, my favourite way to enjoy art is in the comfort of a home, watching work change with the seasons, over time. In a home, art has been chosen or gifted and placed just so in a room to allow the home dwellers to feel a certain way - inspired, calm, intrigued, joyful. It’s like filling your walls with stories to other worlds, other beautiful ways of seeing life.
“In a world starving of soul, your art is the medicine and nourishment and love the world needs.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Éstes
Art helps to give a home a soul. Art fills a home with stories that support and nourish its inhabitants and visitors. In the words of interior designer, Hannah Bullivant “Art can make a room sing”.
Yet in our society art is often reduced to “an investment”, an object that might accrue value over time, or a frivolous, unnecessary luxury. But when we look at how art moves us physically and emotionally, the value of art goes much deeper.
A recent study with 50 participants from Kings College London found that looking at original art had a positive impact on three different body systems – the immune, endocrine and autonomic systems – at the same time. Art doesn’t just move us emotionally – it calms the body too.
A much larger study done in 2020 with tens of thousands of people found that people who participated in the arts more than once a week or who attended cultural events at least once a year had lower levels of mental distress and higher levels life satisfaction (even after allowing for variants in lifestyle, economics and geography).
Art affects us in many varied ways and has a beautiful, complex, layered way of healing us. Art affects our bodies, alters our physical experience, helps us heal and deal with life.
“The more art that is available in the world, the more people are able to experience art’s power to heal.”
- Aimee McNee
I often wonder WHY it is that we feel this way when interacting with art. Is it because we come into contact with a part of life’s essence: creativity? Perhaps when we see and are moved by an artwork we get a glimpse into the fundamental aliveness of the living world? We feel the rapture of being alive?
In my own home, I am slowly collecting art to fill our walls - some gifted to me, some collected from artist friends, some from holidays, some from charity shops. Likely none of them “investments” but each and every one a portal into a world of aliveness.
Recently, as part of my Open Studios event, I framed and put up lots of my own art in my little office/studio. Maybe it seems odd to have your own art on the walls but I absolutely love seeing them up there. Most of them have been made outside with the land and seeing them brings me right back to the moment, the weather, the feeling of the place in which they were made.
In all of the work I make as an artist, I am constantly trying to respond to the swirling, mercurial, movement that is life. I create work that aims to deepen the viewer’s relationship with our messy, beautiful universe so that when you place one of my pieces on your wall at home, you are constantly drawn back into what truly matters - that you belong to this thriving, living, complex earth, just as you are.
p.s. I am currently holding a New Moon 25% Off Art Release Sale on all remaining art prints and original artworks, inspired by mesmerising unity and joy of starling murmurations and the rich, powerful, playful movement of rivers. The Sale ends 21 July 2026, after which I will no longer be offering art prints in the way I do currently, hand packaged and sent directly from my home. May you find a unique artwork to bring you joy, wonder and belonging.
