Museum Rat: CLOSE, Somerset

When everything goes digital, build something profoundly physical

Dec 05, 2025

Rock Paper Scissors at CLOSE Gallery

29 NOV 2025 - 17 JAN 2026

CLOSE is a contemporary art gallery in Somerset that feels deliberately out of step with the city. Founded by Freeny Yianni in 2019, it sits on the grounds of a seventeenth century estate in Hatch Beauchamp. The choice makes sense only when you consider Yianni’s past. She spent almost a decade at Lisson Gallery working closely with major artists and shaping exhibitions inside one of London’s most influential institutions. She understood the speed and scale of the blue-chip ecosystem intimately. Instead of continuing along that well-lit path, she stepped sideways and built something that operates on a different rhythm entirely.

That shift becomes easier to understand when you consider the state of the market. Collectors are buying less. Fairs are shrinking. Digital work competes with the physical. Many galleries are scrambling for visibility in a system that accelerates every year. Yianni’s answer is not to compete with that pace but to reroute it. She doubles down on craft, tactility, raw matter, long-form exhibitions, residencies and deep artist relationships. CLOSE is not a retreat from the art world. It is a response to its exhaustion.

Somerset is central to this. The countryside offers what London cannot: a different attention span. Where the city insists on compression, CLOSE stretches experience out. The barns-turned-galleries act as a natural metronome with long rooms, soft light and windows that frame trees rather than traffic. Walking through these spaces feels almost like walking through thought. The architecture slows you. It makes you sensitive to texture, to pacing, to the quiet between works. It is a curatorial tool, shaping how each exhibition is encountered.

Rock Paper Scissors, the gallery’s winter group show, is perfectly tuned to this environment. On paper, it gathers eleven artists who work with raw materials: stone, porcelain, feathers, wood, leaves, pigments, denim, fragments from daily life. In the barns, these materials begin speaking to one another. The childhood logic of the title - rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, paper wraps rock - becomes a metaphor for creation itself. Pressure, vulnerability, resistance, surrender. The deeper question the show asks is simple: how does the body meet matter, and where does imagination actually begin?

During the show I wrote down a few words. They felt like the atmosphere of CLOSE distilled. Ritual. Material. Psychic residue. Memory. Cosmic femininity. Nature as companion. The hand as portal. In most galleries, these ideas would read as abstractions. Here, they feel present in the air.

The artists approach their materials with a kind of durational respect. Kate MccGwire builds forms out of feathers she collects and cleans by hand. Susanna Bauer pushes crochet to its limits on fragile leaves. Nicholas Lees works porcelain so finely that light becomes a collaborator. Dean Coates channels geological processes through glaze. Ted Rogers shapes ceramics with the rhythm of performance. Each practice is slow, intentional and grounded in physical touch, and each one takes its time asserting itself.

What unifies them is not subject matter but tempo. These works require labour measured in hours, days, sometimes years. Nothing here is instantaneous. Nothing can be produced for the churn of a fair booth or the ephemerality of a scroll. These artists work by listening… to their materials, their bodies, the histories embedded in their techniques. The exhibition becomes a study of the hand thinking through the world.

That tempo is reinforced by the space itself. Works sit with enough distance to be seen without interference. You move through the barns at the pace the pieces demand. There is no urgency, no pressure to leap from concept to concept. The show holds you in a kind of quiet concentration.

The opening made this ethos even clearer. Several artists stood in front of their work and spoke directly to the room. No microphones. No stage. No hierarchy. It felt closer to a salon than an event. A reminder that the art world does not have to operate through distance. It can function through trust, conversation and the closeness that comes from people sharing a room without performance.

This is why CLOSE matters. Its existence is a statement. A founder with a blue-chip background choosing to step away from the speed of London and build something slower in a down market is not nostalgic. It is strategic. It suggests that the future of contemporary art will not be sustained by acceleration alone. It will be shaped by places that protect the conditions for real looking. Places where the line between artist, gallery and audience is shorter. Places where materials are allowed to speak before the market does.

Rock Paper Scissors is a clear expression of that ethos. A thoughtful exhibition inside a gallery designed for thoughtful attention. It shows that slowness is not withdrawal. It is a stance. And in Somerset, that stance is quietly redefining what a contemporary gallery can be.

How to visit

Address: CLOSE, Hatch Beauchamp, Taunton TA3 6AE, Somerset, UK
Opening times: Thursday to Saturday, 11:00–16:00
(Check the gallery website for seasonal updates.)
Tickets: Free entry.
Time needed: 1–2 hours. (The gallery is cosy and intimate, it won’t take too long so you can go in and out and then go for a nice walk.)
Tip: You enter through the grounds. Wear weather-appropriate shoes.