Rock, Paper, Scissors

Artists

Cass Breen

Helen Elizabeth

Caroline Ingham

Starting with a humble sheet of paper, bringing what they had to it, in trust, relationship, reciprocity and economy. And then, they saw what happened.

This exhibition brings three women artists who found something in each other’s making that spoke to a broader sensibility that they each shared- of playfulness, seriousness, surprises, potentials, discovery. With differing backgrounds, interests and starting points, they nevertheless found a kind of language, one that cultivated ideas, risk-taking, and an opening up.

Rock Paper Scissors offers a quiet yet powerful exploration of precarity, resilience, and transformation- rooted in material experimentation but as much about the pauses, the spaces between, the limits, the scrappy edges, the colour of touch, the smell of pressure, the sound of feelings, the bends and the folds, the staying with.

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Cass Breen’s practice is informed by cultural background and personal history, weaving memory with landscape in this new body of work. The sculptures, prints and drawings flow from a recent winter residency in Newfoundland, observing the rhythms of the wild Atlantic, its bleak cold, furious winds and luminous shifting light, on the edge of this east-facing sea, a leitmotif in her personal history. There is a lingering sense of loss after the collapse of the fishing industry and the ubiquitous presence of large fishing net structures in the landscape as fishermen scramble to find new ways of making a living from the sea.

She works with a wide range of materials which guides the making process and is intrinsic to the interplay of form and idea.

Based in London, she completed an MA at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2023 after a career as a leader in education at City Lit and Morley College.

Selected exhibitions: Critical Edge at the Handbag Factory, 2025; Morley Gallery, The Weight of Things, 2025; Morley Gallery, Found|land; 2024 Safehouse Peckham, Unvisible, 2024; Residency, Pouch Cove Foundation, Newfoundland, 2023; Espacio Gallery, Emerging Matters.

She works from her studio in east London.

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“The dense foliage of the old Hornbeam permitted only occasional spots of morning sunlight to find the earth beneath the canopy. I knelt on the bank of the small brook at the bottom of my garden breathing in the quietude of this.The soil I was working with that morning was moist from overnight rain, littered with little twigs, stones and rocks, alive with microbes, worms, fungi and insects. Its rich darkness was under my fingernails and colouring the pores of my skin.My garden had become my studio and everything in it my companion”.

Helen Elizabeth examines the relationship between the human and more-than human, where the vitality and energy of materials, natural processes and elements contribute, as collaborators, to the making of the work, raising questions about power, agency, joining, unlearning and undoing.

Helen is an artist and psychologist based in London. She completed an MA Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, in 2021 and environmental residencies with the artist Aviva Rahmani, 2020 and Aark-fi, 2023. She was the recipient of the Visiting Professor Fellowship, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2024, contributes to the Soil Shroud Project, ‘Soil Dialogues, Ecoartspace, and her work ‘Unseasonable’ 2021 was nominated for the 8th International Marianne Brandt Award, 2022.

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Caroline Ingham’s practice explores the tension between strength and fragility through non-figurative forms that evoke the human body as a vessel of resilience and vulnerability. With an acute awareness of corporeality and material potency, she works between sculpture and painting, using distemper-impregnated paper that is waxed, painted, and stitched. Informed by her experience of chronic illness, her works invite us to explore surface and structure and to consider how physical form holds traces of experience, endurance, resilience, and transformation. Stitching becomes a metaphor for trauma and repair, drawing viewers into an intimate space where the body’s emotional and physical landscapes are quietly reconsidered.

Based in London, Caroline completed her MA in Fine Art (Painting) at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, in 2020, following an extensive career in museum design at the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

Selected exhibitions: Shadow Work (solo), Norwich University of the Arts, 2021; On the Surface, Copeland Gallery, Peckham, 2024; Breathing Space, Nunnery Gallery, Bow, 2024. She has been shortlisted for the Roboz Zsuzsi Scholarship and selected for the Society of Women Artists Annual Exhibition (2021), the inaugural exhibition of artist-led organisation No Place Art, Materiality: Edition One, The Handbag Factory, and most recently The London Group Open 2025 at Copeland Gallery, London.

Caroline currently works from her studio in Peckham, South London.