Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins with fragments and absences.
A line from a book, a missing file, a mark left in the margins—these are my entry points. I gather them through collage, not to resolve them, but to listen for what they nod to, what they might become. Collage is how I think: associative, recursive, drifting between recognition and uncertainty. It allows me to move beyond the linear mind and into a space where intuition, sensation, and memory take form.
I work at the intersection of image and text, where reading becomes a physical experience. To read is to travel across time, to encounter voices that are no longer present and yet still speaking. It is a kind of haunting, and also a form of care. My practice draws on archives, medieval manuscripts, and other systems of recording knowledge and communication, treating them not as fixed histories but as living materials—open to interruption, reassembly, and reimagining.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lesley Finn works with collage, writing, and archival research to study technologies of communication and habits of perception. Drawing on her training in medieval literature, creative writing, and book arts, she traces the tension between text and image, making paper-based work that translates acts of reading and knowledge making into visual, embodied experience. Collage is both method and philosophy: a way of resisting singular narratives and static meaning by reactivating discarded, marginalized material into new, dynamic forms.
Finn’s projects have appeared at Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, The Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and E1507 Gallery among others. Her research has been supported by a 2022 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship at the British Library and a 2025 Artist Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
© Lesley Finn