Lesley Finn
A Field Guide to Entanglement
E1507 Fall Showcase (2025)
Curated by Dustin Kuhns
Photos by Nathan Mitchell
Everything is collage. We build from the raw materials of life—ours and others. Even our most revered, sacred, and “novel” expressions are assembled from existing materials.
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
Though collage is a distinct artistic form, its process mirrors how expression essentially works. A mechanic with a wrench. A portraitist with a brush. A theologian with a pen. Each expression—a turn, a stroke, a phrase—is a momentary collage. From each individual, this fans out into our society, giving us the never static collage of culture where what’s sacred is always in question.
With a knife, Lesley makes this shared process of assembling the sacred visible. A Field Guide to Entanglement dances with religion—American Catholicism in particular. Religion is a human expression of the divine and bears our most joyful and tragic tropes: heroics, infamy, icons and idols. Religion remains worthy of being revisited, rearranged, even reassembled, for as long as we remain human.
Lesley’s sensitivity to the supernatural and the occult makes her work unassuming. Each assembly is materially delicate, meticulous, technically precise, yet conceptually and psychically, they strike with force.
Marble faces and printed stigmata sit beside leaves, tendons, telegraph lines and redaction blocks. Everything feels familiar and strange at once, because our inner image bank is a weird collage too—parish statues and pop culture posters; repair manuals, gardening books and social media reels of AI writing code; a private memory of a hawk cutting the sky and a film scene where a character remembers the same.
But this reassembly of sacred and everyday materials isn’t a flippant dare or heresy. It is what we have always done, whether we admit it or not. It’s how culture remembers and, more importantly, how it continues. These works put simple, serious questions about our relationship to the sacred in plain sight: What isn’t being said? Who is cherished? Who was, is and should be protected?
A home is a setting that slows the pace. Domesticity puts religion at the scale of human life and people at the center of sacred story-telling. These pieces should be discussed around a dinner table with paper napkins, not an archival floor with cotton gloves. Follow a seam where a visual phrase takes an unlikely turn or two images meet, surprisingly. What’s kept? What’s cut?
The parts recur, but the relation changes. Newness enters at the point of meeting—or should I say, “entanglement?” These works do not paper over our cultural or religious past. Instead, they give our past a chance to speak to our present without pretending they are the same.
It’s true: “There is nothing new under the sun.” Although maybe half-true—because even the sun was once new.
About the artist
As a writer and former academic, Lesley Finn 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.