Lesley Finn

I am a creative working in the overlap of writing, visual art, and research.

Whether in the form of essays, fiction, poetic erasure, mixed media collage, drawings, or installations, I make work that traces how narratives, categories, and belief systems shape our lives.

Books and other technologies of communication and information fascinate me. I could say that my visual work uses and takes inspiration from their materials while my written work explores their psychology, but the reverse is equally true.

I have a preoccupation with the interplay between text and image and am drawn to recurrent themes of the uncanny, religious ritual, liminal spaces, unusual kinships, channelings, hauntings, estrangements, and transformations. I’m constantly wondering about the act of reading, how it is at once paranormal—it is, after all, a bit like time-travel and communing with the dead—and utterly normal. I believe that paying attention to these complex, uncertain registers of experience is fundamental to making art.

Many of my projects begin with or are catalyzed by ideas and research practices that grew out of my academic training. I balance this cognitive component of my work with intuitive process. I rely as much on technique and craft as spontaneity and chance, particularly through collage and erasure. The disruptive, transformative energy of these methods, how they reframe and recombine image and language to access new ways of seeing, drives me. While their presence in my visual work is apparent, they play an equally important if less visible role in my written work. Increasingly I make work that resides in between these categories.