Rock Paper Scissors, the latest group exhibition at CLOSE in Somerset, takes its cue from the universal playground game, an elegantly simple system of decision-making that unfolds through gestures of tension, opposition and surrender. Bringing together eleven contemporary artists working across sculpture, ceramics, textiles, installation, and mixed media, the show frames material experimentation as a form of imaginative play, and play itself as a deeply human mode of inquiry.
A Contemporary Hub in Rural Somerset
When founder Freeny Yianni established CLOSE in the rural village of Hatch Beauchamp in 2009, the move was strikingly unconventional. Yet over the years, the gallery has become a vibrant destination for collectors, artists and curious visitors drawn from London and beyond. Yianni, whose background includes working at Lisson Gallery alongside artists such as Anish Kapoor, has built CLOSE into a place where local sensibilities meet international perspectives, and where the pace of looking is intentionally slowed.
Named after Yianni’s seventeenth-century home, CLOSE retains an atmosphere of warmth and quiet attentiveness. The converted stable blocks sit modestly within the landscape, bordered by Devon fields and wide skies; the gallery runs on biofuel, reflecting its commitment to environmental responsibility. This sensitivity to site shapes not only the programming but the experience of visiting: art here extends into the house’s gardens, encouraging moments of contemplation uncommon in urban galleries.
Yianni’s partner in the gallery’s curatorial vision is Sales Director Richard Scarry, an art-world insider from Los Angeles whose relaxed, Californian sensibility complements Yianni’s thoughtful minimalist precision. Together, they form an inventive duo whose exhibitions introduce international contemporary art to the Somerset countryside without disturbing its rhythms. Their shared commitment to slow making – works that require time, care and specialised skill – infuses “Rock Paper Scissors” with a sense of deep craft, tactility and attention.
Material Play and the Pleasure of the Handmade
Driving up the long approach to CLOSE, a pheasant crossing the path unexpectedly foreshadows one of the exhibition’s quiet marvels: Kate MccGwire’s sinuous sculpture composed of meticulously collected and arranged pheasant feathers. Iridescent purples and browns shift across its muscular curves, the organic forms echoed by a hand-constructed plinth made from reclaimed wood. On the wall near MccGwire’s pheasant feather sculpture is a circular artwork created using Magpie feathers, which has a hypnotic quality when observed. Yianni notes that MccGwire lives on a floating pontoon surrounded by birds, an immersive coexistence that lends her sculptures a reverence for nature and its cyclical offerings.
Scarry tells me as we walk through the exhibition:
“Kate just introduced wood into her pieces this year. What’s really lovely is it’s recycled wood from shipping crates. And Kate has done the joining and tooling herself. Then you have this beautiful almost serpent-like feeling of the nodding and movement and balance, all with pheasant feathers. For the Magpie piece it can take up to five years to collect all the feathers in the right size. The performative element of her work is actually gathering everything.”
This meditative sensibility permeates the exhibition. Susanna Bauer’s fragile leaves embellished with lace-like crochet hold a poised tension between care and fragility. Darren Appiagyei, working exclusively with locally sourced wood, presents vessels that celebrate the imperfections of grain and bark. Nicholas Lees’s porcelain forms, delicate gradients of cobalt dissolving into pale earth tones, achieve a stillness that draws the viewer in, attentive to the vibration of light and shadow.
Hana Moazzeni’s luminous Lapis Lazuli Birdsong merges traditional Persian miniature painting with her own handmade pigments and finely crafted mulberry and silk papers; the work channels ancient cosmologies while grounding them in contemporary material practice.
In contrast, Ted Rogers brings a note of humour to the exhibition, their handcrafted ceramic replicas of personal wardrobe items–a worn leather belt, retro designer handbags, baseball caps, a curled thong–transforming everyday accessories into intimate, tactile sculptures. Rogers’s wry tenderness sits perfectly within the exhibition’s ethos: the handmade as a site of both vulnerability and wit.
Yianni says of the exhibition:
“Definitely Richard’s curation, and my continuous desire to make people communicate. I said we should make a show out of nothing. ‘What should we call it’? I wanted work that’s coming from nature, or is craft or making. Then Richard really went for it with finding the artists. So it was a collaboration. We loved the title ‘Rock Paper Scissors’, because as a child you remember playing with just your hands, and you could play for hours. The idea of CLOSE’s ethos is to try not to look at our phones all the time. It’s really damaging our humanness. I think we have a character here that everything we show has a foot in nature, a foot in making, or slow making. So even our minimalist artists take their time making their work, and you can see that here, it makes you feel very relaxed.”
Geometry, gesture and natural order
Several artists engage directly with the structural patterns embedded in the natural world. Dean Coates’s wall-based ceramics reference geological strata and mineral formations, their reactive glazes creating alchemical shifts in texture and depth. Peter Randall-Page’s sculptural forms echo cellular geometries and evolutionary processes, while Amy Stephens reframes objects from the landscape through minimal, architectural compositions that navigate the boundary between drawing and sculpture.
Together, these works activate CLOSE’s rooms with a quiet but compelling dialogue: a choreography of tension and release, much like the game that lends the exhibition its title. Each material – feather, leaf, stone, pigment, fibre – becomes a metaphor for endurance, transience, and the cycles of making and unmaking.
A gallery dedicated to depth and time
The exhibition reinforces CLOSE’s defining ethos: that art should be approached with patience, curiosity and care. Founded in 2019 as both a gallery and project space, CLOSE now encompasses its Somerset location and an additional project space in Marylebone. It continues to support residencies, long-form exhibitions and education initiatives grounded in Yianni’s commitment to working closely with artists.
Rock Paper Scissors epitomises this approach. It is a beautifully paced exhibition that invites viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to consider the elemental pleasure of materials shaped by human hands. In an increasingly digitised world, CLOSE offers a counterpoint, a place where creativity emerges from simplicity, and where the smallest gesture can transform the familiar into something extraordinary.
Exhibiting artists: Kate MccGwire, Ted Rogers, Susanna Bauer, Alice Freeman, Anya Paintsil, Darren Appiagyei, Hana Moazzeni, Nicholas Lees, Dean Coates, Peter Randall-Page, Amy Stephens, Hew Locke
Rock Paper Scissors, 29th November – 17th January 2026 CLOSE
