In Preston, an old industrial building recently came on the market. It used to be the premises of T. Snape &Co., a Preston-based print works firm in operation for over 150 years, that manufactured books and stationery until closing its doors in December 2024. According to the managing director Dominic Swarbrick, it was the last commercial manufacturing firm producing any sort of goods in the city centre, but the business proved unable to compete with cheaper digital products available online. With its closure, Preston lost this archive of skills – the crafting of bespoke items such as odd-shaped artists’ books, using cutters to make windows in paper, real gold foil lettering, fold-out features – and gained an empty building.
The silver lining was that Jeremy Rowlands, the new owner, announced plans to carry out conversion work on the building to turn it into a small business hub and creative centre with an exhibition space.
When the premises were built, according to Chris Aspin’s 1969 book Lancashire, the First Industrial Society, nearly 70% of Preston’s workers were economic migrants with regional, national and international origins, who coalesced into the city’s new working-class community. Together, they produced radical thought and action in response to the conditions they found themselves enduring: Lancashire’s workers were at the forefront of trade unionism and music hall culture. Contemporary local artists are now facing similar struggles: under-resourced and under-represented, with a need to find ways to work collectively to improve the strength of their presence in the city’s creative development and economic renewal plans. In this vein, an interesting initiative was undertaken by artist Hans Browne. Producer and co-curator for Snapes Open Call and Response, the resulting exhibition developed from a call out asking artists to explore this former print works. The initiative also provided a rare moment for artists to gather and talk to each other.
From April to June 2025, twenty-nine artists wandered around and responded to the history of this particular building and its use, taking inspiration from the detritus still scattered about – the old printing tools, ink, paper, cloth and leather for book binding, trays of metal block press type in hand-built cabinets, old wooden shelves, defunct machinery – all strewn among evidence of the wear and tear of years of industry. The wooden storage shelving with edges rounded by years of stock being shifted in and out, the early mechanical typesetting machines that now look like vintage science fiction creations, and the grey hulks of old filing cabinets now marooned on the floor space around them.
The resulting poems, assemblages, sculptures, drawings, and multimedia and hand printed works were then curated into a two-week show in the place that had inspired them. Developed in the weeks leading up to the show, most of the works included were so fresh they were untitled.
Themes of obsolescence and rebuilding were explored in Sam Eadington and Lee Ivett’s large wooden sculpture made from the old wooden type trays that had contained the cast-metal letters used for constructing text on a page pre-mechanisation. Ash Hardman’s assemblage used more of the trays in a floor-standing house of cards configuration, with the addition of precariously placed real lemons. Ecaterina Stefanescu constructed tiny architectural ruins from scraps of wood, positioned in one of the leftover large metal cabinets. With a single beam of light trained on the installation, the structures created beautiful shadows of an imaginary ancient landscape.
Stella Aster produced a Rorschach test-like image of a time-worn texture within the building, in this case a projected image of the workshop floor worn down by foot traffic, passing trolleys and shuffled boxes of printed goods. The cadmium red paint that had covered the workshop floor had unevenly chipped away to reveal the anthracite grey beneath. The image was projected on to the alcove of a boarded window and was redolent of marbled endpapers that used to decorate the inside of book covers in a style of book production that originated probably in China, Iran and the Middle East and was then admired and copied in Europe from the seventeenth century. That’s what I thought of anyway, being a fan of old books. Other interpretations are available.
Joe Millican’s pin hole camera produced two intensely beautiful photographic images: postcard-sized representations of time passing. The first image is of an inside view of a mezzanine loft space in the building that captivated the imagination of a few of the artists and appeared in their work, with its original warm wooden flooring and floor to ceiling windows. Who wouldn’t dream of an old factory loft space with floor to ceiling windows, especially when such spaces are so beyond most new artists’ means? The image has a dreamlike quality, blurred where people, builders and renovators moved around the camera during the two weeks it took to capture the print. Their ghostlike presence, just about visible, is reminiscent of Victorian spiritualist fakery, but here the image is imbued with a real sort of magic. There is an intensity in the depth of light and shadow that a digital photograph cannot replicate. The second image is from the camera being pointed outside the building. There are the monoliths of 1960s residential tower blocks, static against a backdrop of the light lines of sun and moon streaking this two-week encapsulation of an ever-changing sky. As the renovation work continued around the camera, specks of dust had accumulated on the photographic paper, spotting both images and adding to the sense that these works visualised both time and place.
Other artists had scratched, painted and hand-printed words and poems onto lengths of book cover fabric. Teresa Gorrell’s graphic banner ‘True to Type’, for example, was printed using large metal letterpress blocks and hung between metal girders, gently billowing in the breezes from an open door on the hot and busy opening night, as if responding to the ethereal background music. Rob Conroy’s digital work was an overlay of moving image recordings, some taken as artists and builders walked through the building exploring the rooms and objects laying around, with a live-stream of the exhibition-goers projected into the middle of these moving images. What was interesting to watch was how many people stopped to look and, seeing themselves, shied away from engaging. A fear of judgement, or being overly modest, maybe. As I watched the twenty-minute loop of abstracted motion, sound and live-streamed footage, only one person stopped to play around with their own reflection.
Snapes Open Call and Response investigated urban regeneration in a small northern city and asked what the place of independent artists is. Despite so much construction work happening in our cities, it is telling that artists are still reliant on individuals’ efforts to produce the opportunities that enable them to meet and see each other’s work, in this case the new building owner and the local artist who initiated the exhibition.
Snapes Open Call and Response, Snapes Printworks, Preston, 28 June – 6 July 2025.
Chantal Oakes is a writer artist based in Preston, Lancashire.
This review is supported by Brewtime Collective.
Published 04.08.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,221 words