East Street Arts opens its Patrick Studios doors for Open Studios 2026, part of the citywide Leeds Open Studios weekend.
East Street Arts opens the doors of Patrick Studios this September, inviting visitors in to meet the artists, see where the work gets made, and explore painting, ceramics, sculpture, sound and film across more than 20 studios.
Alongside the open studios, Leeds Print Workshop hosts free drop in printmaking, and visitors can try their hand at riso printing at our First Annual Riso Convention. Salon, our group exhibition, is also on display in the Project Space throughout the weekend.
Entry is free, with work available to buy directly from the artists.
Events like this are made possible thanks to the support of funders Leeds City Council, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) and Arts Council England.
This is part of Leeds Open Studios, the citywide celebration of Leeds’ artists and makers.
Visit more studios over the weekend
Meet the artists
Follow the route through Patrick Studios, floor by floor.
East Wing
Alex De Little
(Sound)
Alex De Little is an artist and researcher based in Leeds and London. His practice involves installation, performance, workshops, Deep Listening and writing, often developing through site based work and collaboration. Alex is a lecturer in creative practice at the University of Leeds and a certified member of the Centre for Deep Listening.
Cam Rolland
(Filmmaker)
Cam Rolland is a cinematographer, editor and multimedia filmmaker from Leeds. Since graduating from Leeds Arts University’s filmmaking course in 2023, she has worked on short films funded by Historic England and Arts Council England, as well as music videos, documentaries and short form content.
Andi Walker
(Textiles)
Andi Walker is a Leeds based artist whose practice spans sculpture, textiles, costume and performance. Working with both hard and soft materials, they create sculptural quilts, stitched installations and collaborative projects that explore memory, identity and the stories held in materials. Their work is rooted in care, craft and conversation, creating spaces where overlooked histories, particularly those of LGBTQ+ and other marginalised communities, can be shared. Andi holds an MA in Mixed Media Textiles from the Royal College of Art and has exhibited nationally, most recently with a permanent public sculpture at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Tessa Houghton
(Painting)
Tessa Houghton is a contemporary landscape painter based in Leeds. Working in oils, she creates atmospheric, semi abstract paintings inspired by the shifting light, coastlines and open landscapes that have shaped her life.
Ben Winter
(Painting)
Ben Winter’s practice plays with themes of mythology, influence, connectivity and consciousness through painting, drawing, video and sound. His current work is a series of paintings depicting the dynamics between people in communal environments, including activism and dining.
Basement
Leeds Print Workshop
Leeds Print Workshop is a co-operative, membership based printmaking studio at Patrick Studios in central Leeds, providing facilities and workshops across a wide range of traditional printmaking processes.
James Thompson
(Sculpture, video, sound, performance)
James Thompson is an artist based in Leeds whose site responsive practice explores the perception and interpretation of architectural space through sculpture, moving image and performance. He is currently pursuing a practice based PhD at the University of Leeds, focusing on the traces and afterlives of lost art spaces in post industrial Leeds.
Rhian Cooke
(Installation, moving image and sculpture)
Rhian Cooke is an artist based in Leeds, making work across moving image, animation, sculpture, installation and engagement. Working with handmade processes including textiles, drawing and recycled materials, she takes an expansive sculptural approach to filmmaking, playful and inventive in its use of animation and layering.
Julia McKinlay
(Sculpture and print)
Julia McKinlay’s work is spatial, moving between two and three dimensions and translating forms across drawing, print and sculpture. She creates bodies of work in series, exhibited as spatial assemblages representing imagined spaces and environments where matter and objects interact and create new connections.
Griet Beyaert
(Audio-visual sound work)
Griet Beyaert makes audio visual sound work using materials, generative coding, datasets and algorithmic composition. She is interested in the sensory, internal experience of the spaces we inhabit; her work takes the shape of soundscapes, live performance and collaborative installations.
Ground Floor
Irina Lomash
(Multidisciplinary: painting, printmaking, video, sound)
Irina Lomash is an interdisciplinary artist based in Leeds, working independently from her studio at East Street Arts since completing her MA in Fine Art in 2025. As a contemporary figurative symbolist, she builds layered metaphors exploring the shadow aspects of the mind, collective experience, repressed dreams and memory.
Teresa Flavin
(Painting and mixed media)
Teresa Flavin is an artist, illustrator and children’s book author who creates richly coloured and textured mixed media paintings, juxtaposing finely rendered representational imagery with expressive abstraction. Her current paintings are inspired by the interior and exterior landscapes of Emily Brontë.
Luke Swinhoe
(Collage / found objects, LAU Residency Space)
During his residency at Patrick Studios, Luke Swinhoe has become interested in capturing the elusive essence of the ideas, thoughts and habits that drive us to create. Focusing on speed of creation has led him to collage as a medium, as it takes far less time to manipulate meaning than more traditional processes.
First Floor
Valerie Heskins
(Watercolour, digital collage and oil on canvas)
Valerie’s work explores place, rhythm and character through two distinct bodies of work. In digital collage and oils, she draws on the colours, patterns and rhythms of landscape and the natural world to think about enthrallment and enchantment. A separate watercolour series portrays the people of Leeds from above and behind, considering the diversities within that are revealed unintentionally. A former curator and art instructor, Valerie’s work is held in museums and private collections across several countries.
Also on the First Floor: don’t miss Salon, our group exhibition in the Project Space.
Mezzanine
Frances Norton
(Painting)
Dr Frances Ann Norton is an art educator researcher, artist and chaplain. Her artwork considers what it means to have faith in a secular society, painting Christian icons and abstract, geometric process based drawings, alongside textiles and sculptural ceramics.
Sheila Gaffney
(Sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, research led practice)
Sheila Gaffney is a sculptor and Professor Emerita at Leeds Arts University. Her work explores the intersections of embodiment, memory and identity, developed over more than four decades spanning sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and research led practice.
CA Ryan
(Mixed media, drawing, print, collage, walking)
The identity of CA Ryan began in January 2020 as a new phase of practice, registering a growing sense of vulnerability in the face of the climate crisis, an identity taken on to see the world differently. The most recent project is more overtly activist: a series of 12 walks navigating the perimeters of private land and corporate profit.
Chris Eastham
(Painting)
Chris Eastham is a figurative painter working mainly in oil on canvas, drawing on archive imagery and personal narratives of growing up in the North of England. Chris has exhibited widely across Yorkshire and the North of England, was a quarter finalist in Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, and completed a public commission for Leeds City Council, “A Thread Through Time.”
Gabriella Ranito-Baltazar
(Painting)
Gabriella Ranito-Baltazar is a British Portuguese abstract artist whose work explores connection, memory and the cycles of life. Working with acrylic, texture, sand and layered materials, she creates atmospheric paintings inspired by landscape, emotion and the feeling of belonging, drawing particularly on her Portuguese heritage.
Convention House
Mishka Lesayova
(Natural colour and sustainable photography)
Mishka Lesayova is an artist and materials researcher working with natural colour, foraging hyper local seasonal growth or growing traditional dye plants and flowers. She is curious about how materials carry their own agencies and temporalities, and how working slowly reshapes our understanding of sustainability as an embodied practice of care.
Riso printing drop in, badge making and more await at the First Annual Riso Convention, running throughout Open Studios weekend.
