Statements

David Steans is an artist and writer based in Leeds, UK. He works mainly across text, moving image, sound, installation and collage, and his writing usually takes the form of short prose fiction. The art and the writing overlap and inform one another.

“I’m influenced by genre horror, metafiction, and various vernacular and fan cultures. Themes of trauma, grief and class surface in the work repeatedly, often without me realising. Consciously, I try to create a sense of disquiet or strangeness in technologies of cultural production, working towards something that might be called meta-horror. To do this, I use recursive or 'nested' forms of narrative and storytelling, filtered through the uncanny effects of new media; the 'blurring' of fiction and reality as a method; and a kind of 'versioning', whereby projects and ideas are developed through successive iterations (a process I associate with the mutations and spectral residues of genre dynamics). I see the voice as a material and medium, and it recurs as a subject and feature in my work, where it is often disembodied or ventriloquistic, and generally projects a kind of unreliability, particularly in relation to the speaking subject.” (2021-2024)

Statements

I was recently nominated for an exhibition opportunity. I wasn’t successful. The feedback from the panel said that they could tell the work was high-quality, but didn’t really know what it was about. I got stuck on this comment, as if it were contradictory somehow, and who knows, maybe it is. How could it be good if it isn’t clear what it’s ‘about’? But it got me thinking about what the work does and doesn’t communicate about itself. About what I want to make explicit in the work (or what I think is already explicit, but maybe isn’t), and what is not explicit in the work (what I can’t, or don’t wish to, spell out).

These loose ‘statements’ are an attempt to try and elucidate some of this, for myself and for anyone who is interested in what I do. I intend to keep the most concise or representative of them at the top of the page (see above). Otherwise, I will add new statements and revise existing ones as I go. (2024)

Statements

Years ago I made an exhibition based on a short story/text called The Bin-bag. In the text, a bin-bag full of blood and offal comes to life, as members of the general public are drawn to attack and torture it. In the gallery space I presented a bin-bag suspended from the ceiling with rope, alongside a few other scrappy sculptures, A0 print-outs of the text, and a song. The bag’s lumpy form was filled out with a chicken-wire armature, and attached to some kind of rotating motor, slowly dripping fake blood onto the floor.

At the private view, a friend overheard some visitors sneering at the bag: “Are we really meant to believe that’s full of blood and guts?” Later, my friend commented in imagined retort: “the first word of the text is ‘imagine’!” In other words, no, you as a viewer are not meant to believe that it’s ‘real’, a re-animated bag of meat as described in the story.

Don’t get me wrong, the show was a mess, with plenty of ways to misread it or just miss (mess) it. But, for me, there is something in this anecdote, in that person’s frustrated presumption, that speaks to my work, or the ways I’ve been working for the last ten years or so. The disjunct between the insinuations of fiction and the material reality of objects (more specifically artworks)... (2021)