Photo: Bri Hammond
Some interviews are pretty straightforward. When you ask an artist about their work, they tell you about their inspirations, their process, maybe what they're currently working on, and you walk away with a nice neat picture of who they are.
Talking with Yana Lehey isn't like that at all. I've lost count of the number of times I've sat down with her and found myself stopping mid-conversation to ask what a particular word meant, or scribbling something down to Google it later.
One minute we're talking about crochet, the next we're discussing Irish lace, climate activism, community building, hyper-capitalism, boredom, environmental systems, taxidermied frogs fencing each other and why humans need to be silly more often. How we got there is often a mystery, but somehow it always makes sense when Yana explains it.
After a while I realised why. Yana doesn't really think in straight lines. One idea genuinely leads to another. She’s not giving neat little answers, she's thinking out loud, making connections, correcting herself, chasing tangents, doubling back and gradually revealing how things that seem completely unrelated are actually part of the same conversation. That's what makes spending time with her so fascinating.
Before our interview, I discover she’s teaching herself ceramics for an upcoming exhibition. A fish has already emerged. A rabbit is next. She's also been making fish drawings using metallic paint markers because, as she happily admits, "the shiny colours are fun." That answer in itself probably tells you quite a lot about her. There is a seriousness to her ideas, but not much seriousness to Yana herself. She's beautifully warm, funny, endlessly curious and seems genuinely delighted by learning new things.
"The project dictates the medium," she tells me.
It's a simple sentence, but it explains a lot. While some artists settle comfortably into one medium, Yana tends to follow ideas wherever they lead. If an idea requires crochet, she'll learn crochet. If it requires ceramics, she'll learn ceramics. If it requires some completely new skill, chances are, she'll have a crack at learning that too.
She laughs as she says, "I get more inspiration than I can handle," but she isn't exaggerating. For years she’s carried what she calls "brain books," notebooks full of ideas simply so they'd stop bouncing around inside her head. Some sat there for years before finally becoming artworks. One of those ideas eventually became a series of giant crocheted creatures made from the inner tubes of bicycle tyres. Some people find them adorable. Others find them vaguely terrifying. Yana seems equally pleased by both reactions.
"The best thing that I can hope for is that something sits on that very liminal point. Not quite one thing or the other."
The creatures began as a response to waste and recycling, but like most things with Yana, the conversation quickly expands into something bigger. Before long we're talking about beauty, discomfort, responsibility, landfill systems, corporations and the strange ways people interact with the world around them. Then, almost inevitably, we're talking about community. It took me a while to realise this wasn't just another interesting tangent. Almost every conversation we had, no matter where it began, somehow circled back to the same place … connection.
For a long time environmental issues were a major focus of Yana's work, but these days she finds herself becoming increasingly interested in the ways people relate to each other.
"One of the most powerful things we can do as humans in this hyper-capitalist world is build our connections to each other."
Suddenly everything else started making sense. The crochet. The ceramics. The workshops she runs. Her fascination with old skills like Irish lace and woodworking, even her insistence that people need to get bored occasionally. They're not separate interests at all. They're different expressions of the same philosophy.
At one point she almost pleadingly says, "Make crap art! Oh my God, please. Draw badly, paint badly, sing badly, dance badly. Do it together." I couldn’t help but laugh because she wasn't joking. The more I listened, the more I realised she wasn't talking about skill or talent. She was talking about the simple joy of making something, regardless of whether anyone else ever thought it was actually good.
For Yana, creativity isn’t something reserved just for learned artists or galleries. It's a fundamentally human behaviour. Something we’ve always done. Something that helps us connect, learn and understand ourselves a little better. Throughout the afternoon she keeps returning to things she worries we're losing - practical skills, opportunities for boredom, curiosity, playfulness and the confidence to try things without needing to be good at them.
"A lot of learning comes from boredom," she says. It's one of those comments that sounds completely obvious once you've heard it, but I'd honestly never thought about it before.
Later we're talking about traditional skills and how technology has gradually separated us not only from each other, but from knowing how to actually make things for ourselves. Then somehow we're talking about playfulness, taxidermied frogs fencing each other and why humans have been "dumb and silly and ridiculous forever." Again, it shouldn't make sense… yet somehow it does.
Photo: Bri Hammond
By the end of our conversation I realised that the ceramics, the crochet, the giant tyre creatures, the fish drawings and all the fascinating rabbit holes we ducked in and out of aren't really separate interests at all. They're all connected by the same underlying belief: that learning matters, curiosity matters and making things matters. And that perhaps the most important thing we can create isn't artwork at all, it's connection.
It was easy to see, then, why Yana has found a home at The Mill. Spend any time there and you'll quickly discover artists connecting - working across a remarkably diverse range of disciplines, sharing ideas over a cup of coffee, wandering into each other's studios, asking questions, offering advice, forming friendships and occasionally inspiring something unexpected. It feels like the kind of place where Yana can keep following her curiosity, wherever it happens to lead.
Yana has a remarkable way of making links between ideas that most of us would never think to connect. Spend an afternoon talking with her and you'll probably leave with pages of notes, a dozen new things to Google and at least one completely different way of looking at the world…
I certainly did.
Words: Denise Lange
Images: Yana Lehey