Above the fireplace in a room at Allan Bank house in Grasmere, a lightbox illuminates a blown-up black and white photograph of the printmaker Gwyneth Alban Davis from the 1940s. The photographer has captured her stepping out of her caravan in the Lake District. One hand catches the door as it swings open, while the other rests on a table of buckets and metal jugs as she descends. She’s smiling, yet around her mouth there’s also the suggestion of good-humoured protest – the performance of having been caught off guard. The caravan looks a little shabby but, nestled in the woods, it is surrounded by the lush undergrowth of ferns beneath trees in full leaf, and Gwyneth is perfectly put together – her hair rolled and pinned up, she wears a patterned tea dress, belted at the waist.
Gwyneth Alban Davis arrived in the Lake District in 1946 with just enough money to last her for a two-week holiday. She was twenty-eight years old and recovering from heartbreak: her marriage had been delayed by the war, and subsequently never happened. When she ran out of her holiday money, she began washing dishes at the Pillar Hotel on the Langdale Estate. It was here that she came across an abandoned caravan in the grounds, a remnant of a 1930s holiday camp. She decided that this was her route to staying in the Lakes, and although local residents were sometimes sceptical, she fixed up the caravan so she could live in it and began to run a print studio known as The Caravan Press (or as the ‘carry on’, to locals) from an outhouse, the Shippon, on the nearby Cylinders Farm.
Alban Davis ended up staying in the Lake District for four and a half years. During this time she became close friends with the creative community living there. This included the European avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters, who was in exile from Germany in Langdale from 1945 until his death in 1948, the Expressionist artist Hilde Goldschmidt (also in exile from Austria), and the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon.
This story of creativity, refuge and resilience, forms the basis of one of a pair of temporary exhibitions at National Trust property Allan Bank – Women in Print: The Caravan Press – and serves as the catalyst for the other – Heather Mullender-Ross’s All the Better to Hear You With. Curated by artists and researchers at UCLan, Tracy Hill and Mullender-Ross, the two interconnected exhibitions are hosted on the first floor of this historic villa where Wordsworth once lived, and in rooms adjacent to where Samuel Taylor Coleridge stayed. Alternative creative networks are traced in these exhibitions, which mark the beginning of a two-year partnership between the National Trust and Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at UCLan.
The first of the exhibitions, Women in Print: The Caravan Press, is about Alban Davis, her printmaking and the creative community she became an important part of in the 1940s, with a particular focus on her friendship with Schwitters. In this sense the exhibition is interested in how we might use the names of famous men – Schwitters, or even Wordsworth – as a hook to engage audiences with more diverse creative lives, providing a richer sense of how the landscapes of the Lake District continue to inspire the work of radical, experimental artists and thinkers.
Women in Print combines old photographs from the family archive with the material of Alban Davis’s life as a printmaker, now housed in the Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, UCLan archive: her restored Jardine pedal press, her original lino and zinc etched printing blocks and the prints themselves – which include picture postcards of local landscapes, as well as business and Christmas cards for hotels, shops and houses – recently run-off the restored press by Kathryn Poole, Research technician at Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, in black ink on white paper. Alban Davis’s press commands a corner of the room – a presence – its shiny red rollers and the metal disc of the printing plate beckon for a printer to ‘re-activate’ it, as Mullender-Ross puts it. Visitors are invited to touch digital laser-cut reproductions of the original printing blocks or even to make a rubbing of them with thick, coloured crayons. In this living print studio and dynamic archive, the Gelatin silver print lightbox photographs of Alban Davis in the landscapes of the Lake District compete for our attention with the beautiful views down onto the blue spill of Grasmere Lake, in an act of seductive, romantic time travel.
The picture-perfect view from Allan Bank makes it easy to understand how local artists could find commercial opportunity in this beauty spot. Like Schwitters, who sold landscape and portrait paintings to tourists while he was working on his last great masterpiece the Merz Barn in Langdale (a final example of his site-specific installations known as Merzbau), Alban Davis’s prints represent the commercial instincts she followed to survive, as well as the creative impulses that sustained her independent life in the Lakes. The black and white prints on display show smoke curling from her caravan in a barren winter landscape, cabins in the woods of spruce and pine, as well as local churches. They capture one woman’s vision of a landscape she didn’t want to be parted from – the ‘Dark Bright Valley’, as she called it in an as-yet-unpublished memoir – and which was a refuge in the post-war years.
Heather Mullender-Ross first came across Alban Davis’s surviving archive – the press and around 200 printing blocks – in the Shippon barn on the Cylinders Estate during a residency at the site of Schwitters’s Merz Barn in 2016. She noticed that Alban Davis seemed to be one of those figures ‘sitting just shy of established, written histories’, as Mullender-Ross writes in her publication with Lukas Hornby, The Caravan Press: Making Visible the Archive of Gwyneth Alban Davis (2017). Alban Davis appeared in photographs and the accompanying captions in discussions of Schwitters’s last years in the Lake District, but otherwise there was little else recorded about her life.
Yet there’s one anecdote recounted in the exhibition panel texts that describes her relationship with neighbours and friends as an artist, collaborator and creative equal. Schwitters used to come for tea in Alban Davis’s caravan, where he spoke with her about his work and ‘raided through the bin of misprints in her studio (looking for treasure)’. In 1946 he made a small collage ‘Untitled (with Porcelain Shard)’, also known as the ‘pointless collage’: a response to the diminutive size of the cupboards in her caravan, which Schwitters deemed of no use for anything other than a frame for the collage.. In some unpublished writing quoted by Mullender-Ross in her work on the collage, Alban Davis noted that Schwitters had used the blue and red colours of her caravan in the composition. The collage appears in a small photographic reproduction at the exhibition.
It’s this idea of creative dialogue that fuels the second of the exhibitions at Allan Bank, as well as the longer-term Women in Print project run by Tracy Hill at Artlab. Heather Mullender-Ross’s All the Better to Hear You With is the first in a series of contemporary, experimental print exhibitions that respond to Alban Davis’s archive and legacy as a printmaker, as well as to the site of Schwitters’s Merz Barn.
In a single installation made up of diverse elements including print, sculpture, sound-based works, and video (all produced between 2016 and 2024) Mullender-Ross explores how bird song is perceived, interpreted and recorded through language and experimental mark making. In conversation, Mullender-Ross tells me about how the genesis of these works came from a feeling of alienation from the birds, as well as the natural world more broadly, when she left her London studio and took up her residency at the Merz Barn. When she turned to The Observer Book of Birds for help with identification, all she found was further ambiguity: even though ‘it’s a factual book…you have to decode it. It’s like poetry’, she says. The exhibition documents this process of decoding and records the elusive music of birds in a variety of innovative forms, including sound poems, which have been letterpress printed on roughly A5 pieces of yellow, blue and pale orange paper – an ‘intimate scale’ suggested by Alban Davis’s pedal press and original Gill Sans type, which provide the tools to produce the work. Two vitrines, which form another part of the installation, also make visible the influence of Schwitters’s experimental, expansive approach to sound, orthography, performance and poetry on Mullender-Ross’s expanded printmaking process.
At the centre of the exhibition are three wooden trolleys with relief prints of Mullender-Ross’s mouth, and 160 copper relief etched blocks arranged in compositors’ trays – a printed, or printable, record of the artist’s mouth approximating the ‘cheeaws’ and ‘wees’ that represent her perception of birdsong. It’s this new archive of Mullender-Ross’s attempt to reflect on the gap between how sound is perceived and transcribed that most directly invokes the earlier archive of 200 printing blocks belonging to Alban Davis. Alban Davis’s archive has provided a source of inspiration, as well as the practical tools for printmaking: generating new work, as well as an expanded approach to printmaking.
Mullender-Ross’s diverse and playful attempts to record birdsong come together in the 2016 video piece ‘Domestic Dawn Chorus’, which is funny, wry and devastating. The video steadily layers clips of Mullender-Ross working a variety of objects to produce sound effects that imitate the dawn chorus. Like the Foley artists who create sound effects for film and radio through inventive means (a pair of gloves for the sound of a bird’s wings, as one Wikipedia example has it), Mullender-Ross is creative about how she manipulates the objects to achieve the sound she wants. Over the course of the video, individual objects are revealed to us one by one in video clips that become part of a larger, accumulating gallery on screen. In each of the clips, Mullender-Ross is spotlit in a dark room, ‘playing’ her object on or around a table. Often her hands are in focus, but sometimes an object demands the work of her whole body, like the coins she clatters in her trouser pockets.
Although the title of the piece suggests that these are ‘domestic’ objects, it’s a heightened, surreal domesticity that is on display here. The objects chosen are the stuff of children’s party bags. A squeaking pink pig plushie, lilac rubber duckies, party poppers, plastic toy guns, a gaudy wind chime, a rubber chicken that emits a strangled squeal: these are just some of the objects that we see being activated by Mullender-Ross in the cacophonous layering of her dawn chorus.
The surreal, and at times ridiculous, objects used in the chorus – many of them made from multicoloured plastics – point to the all-pervasive detritus of the Anthropocene, which has found its way into the bellies, bloodstreams, nests and habitats of all the birds, animals and environments of our damaged planet. Soon we’ll need a domestic dawn chorus to simulate the absent fluting of birdsong, sacrificed to the capitalist demands of over-production and over-consumption that have led to declining bird populations in the UK and elsewhere. The Lake District continues to function as a site of refuge for weary city dwellers and Wordsworth tourists, and in a more poignant sense for those recovering from the losses of war (like Alban Davis) or fleeing its effects (Factum Foundation has plans to re-open the Merz Barn site and establish an annual residency for refugee and displaced artists). However, we can’t escape the fact that the Lake District’s ecosystems are more fragile than ever in the face of extreme weather, species loss and pollution.
Precarity and contingency, as well as the resilience required to make art in the face of such conditions, are some of the themes that unite the exhibitions at Allan Bank. Mullender-Ross notes that the wooden trolleys of ‘All the Better to Hear You With’, although fixed to the floor for this exhibition, are on wheels and mobile like Alban Davis’s caravan. The width of the installation is also a nod to Gwyneth, and perhaps to the site-specific collage Schwitters made in response to her caravan and its ingenuity, as it matches the width of a cupboard in the original caravan. The exhibitions ask us to consider what kinds of space and resources are needed to make art in times of crisis, whether personal, political or environmental.
Gwyneth Alban Davis’s archive is testament to how creative and resourceful we might be in response to this question. Across the two years’ of the partnership, Allan Bank will continue to host an expanded version of the exhibition on Alban Davis and the wider creative community of exiles and refugees in the Lake District of the 1940s. It will also continue to provide a space to exhibit work from the Women in Print Residency series curated by Artlab: a programme that uses Alban Davis’s story and her printing press as a catalyst and a resource for experimental printmaking in the present.
In writing this review, I also made use of an article by Heather Ross: (2018), ‘Towards an archaeology of gesture in Kurt Schwitters’ “Pointless” collage (or how I “learned” about Schwitters’ work through painting leftovers)’, JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students, 4:2, pp. 107-20, doi: 10.1386/jaws.4.2.107_1
Women in Print – The Caravan Press and All the Better To Hear You With, Allan Bank, Grasmere, 1 April – 20 December 2025.
Francesca Brooks is a poet and writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by Artlab Contemporary Print Studios, UCLan.
Published 06.05.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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