David Steans | Paperhouse

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.

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.

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.

David Steans: Paperhouse opens at the University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery from 24 September – 10 December 2026