Collection: 25q4 Lesley Finn | A Field Guide to Entanglement

Through razor-sharp reading and assembly, Lelsey Finn recombines pages, diagrams, telegrams, and images to reveal long-quiet histories.

This body of work reflects on belief, protection, and memory through the lens of growing up Catholic in Baltimore—drawing on sources from historical telegrams and birding manuals to The Thorn Birds and the 2023 Attorney General’s Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. 

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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.