Working with The National Trust: Women In Print: The Caravan Press ::::::
Women in Print: The Caravan Press is a new exciting project partnership between Artlab Contemporary Print Studios and The National Trust Lake District, showcasing UCLan’s commitment to sharing heritage skills and creative practice led research.
During 2025 and 2026 a new series of exhibitions curated by Tracy Hill and Dr Heather Mullender-Ross will re-tell the story of the late Gwyneth Alban Davis and her one woman printing business ‘The Caravan Press’ and the new generation of contemporary artists inspired by Gwyneth’s sense of community, creativity and hope.
During 2025 the inaugural exhibitions will feature photographs of Gwyneth’s life, printed materials from her archive and estate as well as Gwyneth’s original printing press, which since 2018 has been part of ACPS archive. Ephemera previously unseen from the Davis family home and artefacts from other public collections will be shown alongside reprints from Davis’s original printing blocks giving new insight and context to the creative community in The Langdale Valley and Lake District during the 1940’s. Whilst the stories of William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter are well known and their work housed in dedicated museums within the Lake District, the story of ‘The Caravan Press’, Gwyneth and her refugee contemporaries, is still relatively absent as part of the local history of the Lakes. Our project dovetails with the recent acquisition of the ‘Merz Barn’ site, by Factum Arte. Gwyneth’s story is intertwined with that of Schwitters, as someone who was his friend and contemporary, working a stone’s throw away, on the same site. Schwitters even used some of Gwyneth’s printed and discarded artwork in his collages, as detailed in her monograph, and through published articles and in personal letters – all of which will be on show at the same time as the Merz Barn site is being developed, 80 years after Schwitters first came to the Lake District.
Accompanying this exhibition is a significant installation by Heather Mullender-Ross; All The Better To Hear You With. This installation explores how bird calls are heard, perceived, written down and memorised. The work emerged from a visit to The Merz Barn in Landgale in 2017, the final worksite of the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a wartime refugee from Germany and friend of Gwyneth Alban Davis.
The project concentrates on the differences between how sounds are perceived and how they are described through the written word, using descriptions selected from The Observer’s Book of Birds and other works by Schwitters. The work combines drawn, etched and printed gestures of Ross performing the bird calls – as they are written down – to generate a new experience of these sonic descriptions. The performed gestures were later transcribed into a set of twelve sound poems. The work in its entirety is presented as a personal taxonomy of sound, as perceived and de-coded through play.
Both exhibitions pull together diverse material that has, until now, been fragmented, offering a more comprehensive history of this period, bridging gaps in research and connecting various individuals and cultural institutions of England his project is significant not only with respect to Gwyneth’s archive, but also for local heritage sites such as the ‘Merz Barn project’, Abbott Hall Gallery, whose collection includes the work of both Hilde Goldschmidt and Kurt Schwitters, and the Armitt Museum and Library who own several examples of Schwitters’ work. By giving visibility to this story, our project impacts upon these other cultural artifacts, to ensure that they too are valued and protected for future generations.
The first two exhibitions will be shown at The National Trust property Allan Bank, Grasmere from April 2025 until December 2025 – https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/lake-district/allan-bank-and-grasmere
A series of public workshops and curatorial talks have been developed and delivered by research staff Tracy Hill, Dr Heather Mullender-Ross, Dr Jackie Haynes and Kathryn Poole engaging audiences and visitors and sharing expertise and knowledge.
A new curatorial video has been produced by The National Trust which accompanies the exhibitions providing valuable contextual understanding for the exhibitions and the significance of the creative community within the lake district after WW2. View the video here
Francesca Brooks essay: The Caravan Press and All the Better to Hear You With – https://corridor8.co.uk/article/the-caravan-press-and-all-the-better-to-hear-you-with/