Did you know that incorporating art into your workplace can have a massive impact on staff wellbeing? A study conducted by Dr. Craig Knight, from Exeter University, found that office workers reported feeling less stress, more mental clarity, less anxiety, and had fewer sick days all round, leading to a staggering 42 percent increase in employee wellbeing.
Whether you’re introducing a sculpture or a painting there’s always something to look at, and our brains are constantly stimulated. When we hit screen fatigue, move away from our screen, stare up and lose ourselves until our brain feels ready to pick up where it left off.
Art in Offices founded by Katie Henry in 2012 acknowledged the benefits of including art in our workspaces, sharing a similar vision as Sagal’s to create inspiring, enriching, and motivating spaces for everyone to enjoy and even love where they work! If you’re looking for a way to add personality to your workspace, having original art pieces in your office is a great start.
We asked Art in Offices who their top three artists are right now?
Mark Beattie
Art in Offices highly rates the artwork of Mark Beattie, who works with metal and light to create ethereal sculptures which are truly Avant-Garde.
Mark works with gold, silver, copper and other metals which he bends and forms to create incredibly elegant “orbs” which feel like celestial spheres. Sometimes he even adds neon lights or makes the whole structure from neon.
The addition of the neon gives these reflective pieces a wonderful glow, and when you walk past them in a reception your eye is drawn, like a moth to a flame. In the dark winter months, the space around the artwork is bathed is happy light, and in the summer, the orbs are like sculptures of the sun made real. They are unusual but satisfying and artworks that catch the eye because they are so truly unique and will leave a lasting impression on anyone entering your building.
Olly Fathers
The second artist Art in Offices highly rate is Olly Fathers. Olly’s work transitions between free-standing sculpture and wall-mounted sculptural pieces, which means that if you have a reception space that has room for both, you can easily curate a mini-exhibition of his work.
Olly’s pieces are incredibly attractive because of the palette of pastel colours he uses which invoke a sense of childhood, playtime, colouring-in and being a kid. There’s also a very retro feel to his sculptures which have a geometric quality to them, like balancing building blocks and playing Jenga.
His wall-based pieces are all about communication structures across towns and cities. The raised forms represent buildings and the colours lines the routes of cars, busses tubes, power cables, internet lines and infrastructure in general.
Sam Shendi
Art in Offices third top tip for an amazing artist to have in your reception is Sam Shendi. Sam’s statues are as far from the classic statues of the British Museum as you can get. He has created his own language of sculpture, creating pieces that are movements and expressions but decorated in bright and playful colours that are evocative of Bertie Bassets Liquorice Allsorts.
If you were to compare Sam’s work to a more famous artist, you might think of Jeff Koons and his balloon dogs, but that would be to ignore that Sam’s work is rooted in his Egyptian cultural heritage, and although his work can end up looking like a giant toy, there are serious historical elements in there. For example, many of his statues draw on totems, golems, sphinxes and the animalistic shapes seen in hieroglyphs.
But even without knowing that, when you look at Sam’s work you can’t help but smile. The bright colours are smile makers and when you are thinking about putting art into your workplace, it’s all about creating an atmosphere that’s conducive to making you feel happy, which is why those figures shoot up when people get to decide for themselves what they see (one person’s rubbish is another person’s treasure after all).
