Lesley Finn is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, writing, and installation.
Her visual work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions most recently at the Institute Library, E1507 Gallery, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Her nonfiction, poetry, and fiction appear in BOMB, Longreads, Wyrd and other journals. A recipient of an Artist Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, she has served as Artist-in-Residence for the Connecticut Audubon Society and as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library, London. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English from Columbia University, an M.Phil in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from the University of Cambridge, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Born in Baltimore, MD, she lives in Connecticut and works from her studio in New Haven.
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.
Fragmentation resists the single story. It makes room for multiplicity, for contradiction, for the unknown. Through cutting, layering, and recomposing, I follow connections that cannot be fully explained in advance. Meaning emerges slowly, through attention.
I move between writing and visual work without distinction. An essay can be a collage; a collage can be a form of reading. Both are acts of gathering and rearranging, of making sense and unmaking it again.
I am interested in what happens just before something becomes legible—when language is still forming, when an image is still becoming. In that space, knowledge is not fixed but felt, provisional, alive.
Read more about Lesley in her interview with The Weird Show.
For inquiries or to connect, send a message to lesley@lesleyfinn.com.
Follow Lesley on Instagram @lesfinn.
Sign up for Collage Mind, Lesley’s monthly-ish newsletter, here.
photo by Amelia Ingraham