Yana Solovyova

Artist statement

As an artist I am interested in how human memory works — personal, family, collective. Working with threads and textiles lets me open up questions of preservation, loss, deformation and the overwriting of history through visible seams, tears, holes, patches and joins.

I use hand weaving, plaiting, patchwork techniques, embroidery and collage, and I draw on the forms of traditional textiles and elements of folk dress. I prefer vintage, ethnographic and second-hand materials.

Research is an essential part of my practice: I work from my own field recordings, from archives and from ethnographic and anthropological scholarship, combining artistic and interdisciplinary approaches.

The viewer's response matters to me, so many of the works invite participation: interacting with an object or transforming it.

Biography

Yana Solovyova (b. 1982, Angarsk, Irkutsk region) is a textile artist and a folklorist with a PhD in philology.

She came to textiles from folklore studies. Since 2002 she has taken part in field expeditions to villages of the Russian North with the Department of Russian Folklore at Moscow State University, recording thousands of interviews. Her own archive holds 3,820 recordings made on more than twenty expeditions between 2002 and 2015.

Her project Natkala, founded in 2017, works with hand weaving, the northern lyapochikha patchwork technique and reclaimed textiles, making objects out of field recordings.

Projects

Lesopoval (2020–2024). A research-based textile project about the fate of young women during and after the war. At its core are testimonies I recorded in 2010 in the village of Sinegorye, Kirov region: the bitter winter in the forest, the 600-gram bread ration the girls did not eat but carried home to their starving families, the daily hardships of girls aged thirteen to sixteen. And how in one village all the future brides perished at the logging site, and in spring, when the cemetery bank was washed away, girls' braids appeared from under the ground. The form came from a logging work costume — a jacket and skirt woven from strips of cloth — seen in 2013 at the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia. The cardigans are woven from more than 30 kg of worn clothing on a linen warp, partly hand-dyed. The project also includes the sound performance Les (The Forest).

Keeping the Threads (2024–2025). An installation for the 5th Triennial of Textile Art at Tsaritsyno, Moscow. A tent woven only from thread ends left over from cut-off warps, knotted by hand over about two years — a practice that existed in tradition, where yarn made from leftovers was called poplyovki. A basket of threads sits on the floor: visitors can sit down and join in, tying threads into a story of their own.

Frames (2024). Textile objects; cotton, linen. Three objects — parts of a wedding costume — about the vulnerability of an exposed body, the bitterness of being unable to restore past wholeness, and about the invisible support that remains when everything else is lost. Shown at Heirloom, Tbilisi (2024) and Munich Jewellery Week (2025).

Divinations (2024–2025). A collection built on sound: textile cords with detachable antique sleigh bells, drawn from Christmastide divination by listening.

Lyapochikha (since 2024, ongoing). A study of the northern patchwork technique across different materials, including a fabric made from the threads that fall out of the scraps.

Contact

yanatkala@yandex.ru
+7 925 311-36-19 — WhatsApp, Telegram

Open to collaboration and invitations.