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Lesley Finn

@lesfinn

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paper | glue | birds | words | books | ghosts
New Haven + Guilford CT

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FROM THE COLLÉ ARTSY COLLECTION —⁠
⁠
Lesley Finn⁠
Goatsucker, 2023⁠
Paper collage on book page⁠
5 1/4 × 7 3/4 in⁠
$650⁠
⁠
Lesley Finn is an American-British artist, writer, and educator based in Connecticut, USA. While studying for a PhD in medieval literature she began training in book arts and left academia to pursue that and other creative work. Her collages, which often examine the interplay between text and image, reflect her longtime fascination with books and other technologies of communication. Exploring themes of gender, transgenerational memory, and unusual kinships through an uncanny lens, she uses collage to trace the past that continues to shape the present. In addition to contributing to literary magazines and book projects, she has shown her work nationally in group and solo shows.⁠
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Goatsucker is currently available through Collé on Artsy.⁠
⁠
Explore the collection via the link in bio. by @lesfinn

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5 days ago

not sure about that comma but it insists on staying and this entire project is not sure

#collage #blackoutpoetry #cutandpaste by @lesfinn

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9 days ago

some page close-ups from recent bigger-than-a page work

#collage #cutandpaste #alteredbook by @lesfinn

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23 days ago

seeking and finding, the heart beats

from an ongoing book-length erasure collage

#collage #cutandpastecollage #bookart #alteredbook by @lesfinn

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a month ago

being impossible | 2026

36 inches x 25 inches of book pages, tissue, archival images and original photographs printed on kozo and silk, acrylic paint, hinge tape, and gel medium

folds up to a nearly flat 9 x 12.5 inches, like a map

which it is — to my thinking, connecting, and intuitive sensing as I work through revising and re-visioning a draft of my book on a medieval mystic and a modern spirit medium, which is really a book about testimony, authorship, and women being impossible

this collage is a way of knowing that unfolds visually alongside the work of putting words on a page… my brain is happiest when it can do both

#collage #cutandpaste #bookart #amwri̇ti̇ng by @lesfinn

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a month ago

creepy reading to close 2026 🖤 tracing hauntings and houses across three American novels from three different centuries at CFF this fall 🖤

starting to prep with The House of the Seven Gables… so far my take is Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a lot of words by @lesfinn

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a month ago

Men of Progress 1898, a collage of found paper, pastel, and tissue on a book cover, is on view at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago for the group show Feminism 250, closing 9/26.

The cover/substrate is the original book, called Men of Progress, published in 1898. It was a pay-to-display yearbook with photos and written entries listing all the impressive things the men did. I ripped out the pages and populated it with images of women doing domestic labor from another book of a similar period, and added rubbings of lace from my great-grandmother’s sewing basket. She had to quit her job when she got married because she out earned her husband.

I made the work at the Keyhole Residency at ECOCA in New Haven in 2023, a month of space and time that nourishes me still.

The installation at WMG brings focus to that jagged, gutted spine, which I love. Grateful to be part of this show.

#collage #cutandpaste #alteredbooks by @lesfinn

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2 months ago

a few recent experiments by @lesfinn

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2 months ago

my last book of collage erasure used first person, here I go again

am convinced I reach for it as an ongoing exorcism of that distant, disembodied academic third person

and what can I say, the horses and unicorns want to speak

#collage #blackoutpoetry #cutandpaste by @lesfinn

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2 months ago

5 more works from Deus Ex Bark-ina featuring @sophielarrimore ‘s Similar Work, @inkpa_mani_art ‘s What Will I Tell Her, @lesfinn ‘s Spectral Families, @saft1saft ‘s Posers, and @piercecorbink ‘s Eschatology and Genesis pt. I. Opening this Sunday @ecoca_nhv in New Haven, CT. by @lesfinn

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2 months ago

was going through a studio shelf today and found this blank journal I made over a decade ago and somehow never used or put on sale

the inset is a tiny screen print I made on a Gocco machine, now obsolete or—depending how you look at it—transmuted into the Risograph (same parent company)

the original amphora image is from a Xerox handout in grad school… a copy of a copy (of maybe another copy of a copy)

I made the endpapers using a paste paper method I learned at the Center for Book Arts in NYC after dropping out of said grad school

pretty sure the place where I bought the book cloth and other materials is no longer in business

in a way, it’s a cv, a photograph, an archive, a map

and it makes me want to make books from scratch again

#bookarts #gocco #centerforbookarts by @lesfinn

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2 months ago

new altered book of erasure-collage underway…

A few months ago someone gifted me an old book of Christian Science poetry that got me thinking about the Serendipity series of weirdly moralizing early reader books I loved as a kid. Didn’t realize the weird moralizing until I revisited them as an adult. The book about a girl and a unicorn book had been my favorite—little did I know it was preaching productivity and shaming laziness and procrastination.

So, my revision begins…

#bookart #cutandpaste #alteredbooks by @lesfinn

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2 months ago