Collection: 25q4 Lesely Finn | A Field Guide To Entanglement

What are books for? They are objects created to transport information from the brain of one person to another. They are so ordinary to us that they can seem like simple technologies. 

Yes, books and documents are physical, material objects. And yes, at the same time, they are formed by and contain non-physical thoughts, ideas, emotions, beliefs. When investigating books and documents—in my case with paint, ink, thread, glue, and scalpels—we can tease apart the entanglement of physical and non-physical to explore the unnoticed stories and meanings.

In this way, I approach visual art as a reader, editor, and writer, with books and documents as my primary material, and in the works for this show, using collage as my method. 

Collage disrupts to transform. Taking apart, cutting through—these acts crack open awareness, and ask important questions. What is here? What isn’t? What is or isn’t being said? Why? I use collage to uncover what has been silenced, marginalized, or left out altogether. 

And then, as I recombine pages, images, and words from popular novels, public records, and personal or institutional archives, new relationships and long-quiet histories surface. A different way of seeing and knowing emerges.

The source texts for the work shown here include historical telegrams, Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, an encyclopedia of Byzantine and Medieval Art, birding manuals, botanical prints, and the 2023 Attorney General’s Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The latest works included in the show use collage to unpack religious texts and experience that is personal and specific to growing up Catholic in Baltimore. These works are the field guide I wish I had as a child.

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BIO

As a writer and former academic, Lesley has long used reading and research to question what stories get told and which ones get buried. She works with books, public records, and archival ephemera, cutting and recombining text and image to resurface connections between gender, spirituality, memory, and daily life. Born and raised in Baltimore, she currently works from her studio in New Haven. Her recent projects draw on historical telegrams, manuals, and church documents to ask who is protected, who is heard, and how images and texts shape what we call truth.

Much of her work begins with and develops through site-based research, artist residencies, and fellowships at places as varied as the Connecticut Audubon Society, the British Library, and the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, NY. She has contributed to group and solo shows throughout the US. Her visual and written work has been published in books, zines, and journals such as Collé, Longreads, BOMB, and more. She teaches writing at Yale University in New Haven and leads reading groups at the Center for Fiction in New York.