David Steans: Paperhouse

Paper occupies a distinctive position within artistic practice. It is at once provisional and permanent, ordinary and transformative: the surface on which ideas first emerge, the material through which they circulate, and often the residue left behind by creative thinking. Inexpensive, reproducible and endlessly adaptable, paper moves between sketchbooks, posters, notices, architectural models, bureaucratic forms, textbooks, letters and collages alike. Its inherent fragility is central to this proposition. Easily folded, cut, torn or discarded, paper resists monumentality while remaining capable of constructing entire worlds. These qualities become the point of departure for an expanded exploration of collage, model-making and institutional space.

David Steans’ solo exhibition Paperhouse brings together collage, text, sculptural installation and architectural model-making, working through an intuitive and open-ended process of making to explore the spaces where artistic production, institutional life and popular visual culture intersect. The exhibition develops an expanded understanding of collage that exceeds the boundaries of the cut-and-paste image. Here collage becomes both a formal strategy and a conceptual method: one that assembles fragments, shifts between scales and generates unexpected relationships between the familiar and the uncanny. Throughout the exhibition, paper repeatedly changes register, becoming image, object, backdrop, model and environment.

At the centre of the exhibition stands a large architectural model inspired by the Blenheim Walk Gallery, hovering somewhere between maquette, doll’s house and sculptural proposition. Rather than functioning as a faithful miniature replica, it presents the gallery through the artist’s own logic of making. Familiar architectural features are selectively compressed, rearranged and reimagined, inviting viewers to look at the University Gallery anew—not as a neutral container for art, but as an active site of imagination, perception, pedagogy and artistic production.

Steans’ practice has long explored the peculiar atmospheres of institutional spaces and the quiet absurdities embedded within systems of communication. Offices, waiting rooms, classrooms and exhibition spaces appear simultaneously recognisable and strangely displaced. Rather than offering a direct critique of these environments, his works reconstruct them through subtle distortions, humour and narrative slippages, revealing the performative logics of bureaucratic systems and institutional language.

The exhibition also reflects upon Steans’ longstanding relationship with art education. Collage occupies a foundational place within twentieth-century art school pedagogy, where it has often functioned as an exercise in composition, experimentation and visual thinking. He returns to this history while expanding it through references that extend beyond the academy, drawing from graphic design, DIY publishing, punk aesthetics, posters, zines, illustration and other vernacular forms of image-making. These visual languages coexist without hierarchy, dissolving distinctions between the institutional and the everyday, the refined and the improvised.

David Steans’ Paperhouse is curated by Dr Marianna Tsionki, Associate Professor & University Curator, Leeds Arts University, with Ruth Viccars, Curatorial Assistant, Leeds Arts University.

David Steans is an artist and writer based in Leeds, UK. Working in text, moving image, sound, installation, and collage, he creates a sense of strangeness in technologies and institutions of cultural production. Notable projects include Poorly Moon, commissioned by Yorkshire Contemporary (2026), Mummy Hood Nesting Forest (2022), commissioned by Primary, and Puppy the Goblin, screened at Tate Britain in 2022. He has written erotic Deftones fan-fiction for Vice Magazine (2025), legend-tripped a cursed tv show for ‘Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic’ (2021), and published a collection of experimental horror stories, now held in Tate Library (From the Lounge, 2018).