The belonging of art

“Buy art," my manager once told me, "it's more fun than an ISA". I balked. The remark was funny, even a little revolutionary — fuck banks, love paintings — but brimmed a level of class confidence completely alien to me. Art in domestic space was not part of my childhood. I’d grown up in a middle class but vigorously frugal family where collecting paintings was as foreign as foreign holidays. The taste, privilege, largess and wit of that former boss, all crammed into a single quip of financial advice, left me reeling.

Of course I’d learned about art as a child. My siblings and I squinted at oils and bronzes in regional museums and took brass rubbings in rural churches. I liked “the sunflowers guy” and “the water lilies guy” I think because Impressionism seemed more vivacious than other schools of painting I’d encountered. Occasionally we took the train to big cities in order to gawp our way around galleries. I remember peering up at Louise Bourgeois’ Maman when Tate Modern first opened and wondering why the objectively terrifying form made tween me feel strangely comforted. Art was not a total stranger in my life, but the walls of a home – at least my home – were not for curating, that was something only posher people did.

I can pinpoint the exact moment my stubborn asceticism started to thaw. It began with coffee. I was at Paddington train station waiting for a late train to Wales. I was thirsty and, for the first time in my life, realised that I now earned enough as an editorial assistant at the Architectural Review to afford a coffee from Pret. On my new salary the drink would not be a wild extravagance, but a manageable price to pay for a small pleasure. For the length of time it took me to sip that coffee I felt like a millionaire. It was a revelation. I am now enjoying a similar revelation with art.

It is hard to erode the years of social programming that has taught me and wider British culture to devalue art. How can we indulge in the appreciation of creative expression when for so long national rhetoric has sneered at anyone foolish enough to attempt a career in the arts? State support for culture has been hollowed out. Creative education in comprehensive schools is in crisis. The scraps of public arts funding that still exist, are often only eked out on the condition that recipients don’t merely produce cultural work, but provide welfare services, tackling complex social problems as part of their artistic process. Even well-meaning defenders of the arts quantify the value of our cultural economy in financial term. If the British government is sending a message about the value of art for art’s sake it is this: “don’t bother”.

The high art world doesn't help – a preening place full of investors and curators obsessively performing their exquisite taste to each other. I don’t blame anyone who retreats from those spaces as I once did. But the art world is not art, just as FIFA is not football, sweatshops are not fashion and supermarkets are not food. Art is more important than the art world or art funders, and far more nourishing than a Pret coffee. Just as I took the plunge on that black americano, in more recent years I have begun to take the plunge on art, swallowing my Calvenist childhood instincts, and giving myself permission to both buy work from artists I admire for the first time, and make kinetic sculpture of my own.

My pieces are delicate, pretty things, often colourful, shiny and sinuous. They dangle and twist in the slightest breeze, bouncing off the work of Calder, Miro, Munari, Rodchenko, Flendsted and other inventive mobile designers of the past. As clients have begun coming to me with commissions, I am often asked, how I decide what kind of work to put in a space. What does it mean for art to “belong” in a place? Deciding what to hang where can be a challenge – for mobiles just as it is for paintings. It is one thing to buy art, but another thing knowing where to stick it. I’ll never forget the shame of coming home to find an ex flatmate had de-mounted all the artworks I’d hung in our shared flat and hidden them in a cupboard. Snobs will be snobs, but it hurt like hell.

A visit to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge helped. Seeing Jim Ede’s remarkable collection of paintings and objects hung at surprising heights and angles – snuck into nooks and intermingled with household furniture – I finally realised art shouldn't be a posh rarified thing at all. It should be as everyday as toast, as commonplace as toothpaste and as present in our lives as possible. Art should be fun and familiar. Ultimately the only rule you need to follow to decide whether a piece belongs in a space are whether it feels right. Sometimes the glint of a shared colour palette or material is enough to site one of my mobiles. When I’m working on a bespoke commission it is easy to find hooks within the context which invite particular specific sizes, shapes and styles of response. I’m working on a big brass piece at the moment whose configuration and hanging location is dictated by the doorswing of two internal shutters that open out into the space around it. For another commission, my client wanted a piece which resonated with the hues of her home. Another, in a stairwell, is designed to catch the light.

Finding more poetic narratives to help make decisions about where to hang art is also rewarding. Alongside my mobiles, I’m proud to be growing a small collection of paintings, weavings and drawings almost entirely by young artists. Among others I have an ink study by the German carpenter Johannes Fuchs, a painting on glass by Londoner Jacob Wolff and Your Eyes, a painting by the Dane Benedikte Klüver. The gentle features of her subject's dark black face are discernable below their cream hat but barely. In low light, even the deep blue background fades into the gloom, leaving only the whites of eyes — the sclera — flashing through the dark. I have hung Your Eyes near a Chris Ofili print of another black subject this time in profile, and a faded photograph of the space shuttle Challenger in orbit during the maiden voyage of Sally Ride, America's first female astronaut.

The three pieces have an implicit visual relationship — white focal points against dark black backgrounds with splashes of colour, but also a thematic connection. They speak about the people who have not traditionally got to be the subjects of paintings, or of historic moments such as space missions. Perhaps it is pretentious to imagine that the corner of a living room can tell a story about structural oppression, but the point is not to create didactic narratives like a museum gallerist, it is simply to find a hook which can help you to decide how to best pair art and place. Sometimes a connection just feels right. Above my sofa a Neave Brown etching of an Indian stepped well hangs close to a ceramic sculpture by Camila Bliss and a timber mobile of my own. Formally Brown, Bliss and my pieces are nothing alike but, for me, for all invoke into some shared sense of folk ritual.

Whether buying or making art, the question of where and how it should be hung is easily as important as the work itself. But an important decision does not have to be a heavy one. Though I rejected his financial advice, ultimately my boss was right, art should be fun. So have fun deciding where to hang it.