Leeds Arts University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery presents Paperhouse, a new exhibition by artist David Steans.
Leeds Arts University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery is pleased to present Paperhouse, a new solo exhibition by artist David Steans, bringing together collage, text, sculptural installation and architectural model-making to explore the spaces where artistic production, institutional life and popular visual culture intersect.
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. Easily folded, cut, torn or discarded, paper resists monumentality while remaining capable of constructing entire worlds.
Paperhouse pushes collage beyond the cut-and-paste image, using it as both formal strategy and conceptual method: assembling fragments, shifting between scales, and generating unexpected relationships between the familiar and the uncanny.
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.
“We are delighted to present Paperhouse, an exhibition that embodies the experimental spirit of both David Steans’ practice and Blenheim Walk Gallery’s commitment to research-led artistic practice. Moving fluidly between collage, sculpture and architectural imagination, the exhibition reminds us that the most familiar materials can open unexpected ways of thinking about creativity, education and the spaces in which art is made.”
— Dr Marianna Tsionki, Associate Professor and University Curator
Steans’ practice has long explored the peculiar atmospheres of institutional spaces and the quiet absurdities embedded within systems of communication. 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 Steans’ longstanding relationship with art education. He returns to the foundational place of collage in twentieth-century art school pedagogy while expanding it through references beyond the academy, drawing on graphic design, DIY publishing, punk aesthetics, zines and other forms of vernacular image-making. These visual languages coexist without hierarchy, dissolving the line between the institutional and the everyday, the refined and the improvised.
“In the 1988 dark fantasy film Paperhouse a young girl falls ill and inhabits a fraught dream world created from her drawings. I’ve always loved the title (which I of course stole for this exhibition) but also understand the ‘paperhouse’ as a potent metaphor for our potential to construct image-worlds from the merest of materials and the uncanny power of reiteration and reflexivity. I am grateful for the opportunity to make my own ‘paperhouse’ via this encompassing presentation of new work.”
— David Steans, artist
David Steans: Paperhouse opens at the University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery from 24 September – 10 December 2026. More information, including full opening hours, can be found at: www.leeds-art.ac.uk/david-steans-paperhouse
Main image: David Steans, ‘Natural Life’, 2025, emulsion, inkjet, loom charm, eyelets, collage, acrylic medium on paper, 297mm x 420mm
All Photography by Jules Lister.
