tracing the pulse
collage mind newsletter / vol. 50 / February 2026
Dear Friends:
February greetings and welcome to those of you who joined recently thanks to my interview earlier this month with The Weird Show. I’m so grateful for the wonderful folks at that platform, for that special conversation, and that you are here because of it.
As I mentioned in the interview, Collage Mind is part process note, part collage-as-method reflective essay, and always shifting in reference to what I’ve been working on, reading, seeing, thinking about. In the last month, that has been a breadcrumb trail initiated by a piece of source material, an electronics magazine from the 1970s. Its technical images have taken a hold of me.
I love living in the questions around this kind of moment. Namely, what guides us in choosing material to work with?
For some people it’s not too important; the art happens regardless. The material is a building block, a canvas. But for others, and I count myself among them, that often-mysterious pull towards source material can reverberate long into the making process, and can expand into new ways of working.
I’m usually librarian-worthy with my provenance notes, keeping track of where and when I acquire new collage stash, but not with this electronics magazine. I don’t know why I have it. There is nothing promising on the cover. I would not have known what it contained, because I have no knack for anything with wires. Physics was my worst subject in school. (Is that even the subject for electronics?)
But the magazine made its way into my studio. I don’t know how long it sat in the corner where my stash lives. Or why I pulled it out to use last year. That moment, I wish I could slow down that moment. What was it that made me go, this? But that instinctive choice happens so quickly. I suspect if we slow down and analyze, it wouldn’t happen. We’d talk ourselves out of it.
When I opened the magazine, I saw page after page filled with images like this:
Maybe because I didn’t know what I was looking at, I saw shapes, and I saw beauty. Bold lines and curves, hollow circle ends. All fitting together in a harmonious assembly I could sense even if I couldn’t understand.
To the electronic gadget person, they likely appear to be ordinary circuit boards. To me, they looked like otherworldly symbols. I was reminded of the borer beetle tracks that I’ve seen on trees here in the northeast of the US.
My impulse was to cut up the components of these images. It was tedious — not my usual kind of tedious, which is in the glueing — but I kept moving until I could see all the elements separated. In that fragmentation, the circuit symbols became something else. I may have destroyed the overall electric structure, but the symbols still had charge.
I started to use the elements in a series I’ve been working on, Quantum Divinations, that uses diagrams from water heater boilers, which I had chosen for the intense blue color and the scratchy looking lines, not the electrical component. And yet, that choice felt like a premonition. Little did I know that this was true in more ways than one.
Free from their original context, mixing with my workspace piles, those shapes started to transmute. Placed next to images of moons and galaxies and other celestial imagery I was using for the series, they looked like constellations. Which was weirdly synchronous for a series thinking about divination in the skies, reading the symbols there. The overlap kept tugging at my thoughts. Constellation maps. Star maps. Energy maps. I started to think of constellations as circuitries of energy. I started to wonder if electronic circuitry imagery was modeled on constellations.
Around the time I started adding the electronic elements to the series, I visited the Drawing Center in New York and saw cousins of the symbols in the ballpoint pen and scotch tape work of Melvin Way:
A few weeks later, doing research for my book project, I came across a listing of the names and symbols for angels — (a long story for another time) — that looked an awful lot like parts of an electronic circuit board. A little more sleuthing around that connection led me to a chart of sacred circuitry symbols meant for meditation, each of which once again looked like they came from my 1970s electronics how-to-magazine.
When I dug a little deeper, I learned the symbols were connected to the celestial, in that they were communicated to a former Hollywood filmmaker by an extraterrestrial being named Bashar.
And that was when I decided it was a good time to get back to my work.
Yes, I tend to do a gentle U-turn when I reach the cul-de-sac of galactic beings and spaceships. (What can I say, we all have our shortcomings.) But I had reached a satisfactory end to the search: these graphic symbols, whether itemized into a meditation guide or mapped into constellations or organized to create electronic motherboards, speak to a human need for communication and connection. And, admittedly, the first thing I thought when I saw those beetle marks on trees many years ago was that they looked like a galactic language. Full circle.
This looping and branching of electronics, circuitry, energy, and the celestial — it may be nothing; it may be something. Whatever the case, that maybeness, that space between the unknown and the known creates a hypnotic jolt of possibility. It’s that voltage of the in-between that runs through collage as a practice and a mindset.
Some days working with the circuitry symbols I feel like I am making glyphs — purposeful marks, but not necessarily with a known purpose. Or with a purpose that the composition or its viewer determines. Other days I am sure I am inscribing letters in an asemic language, crafting a code. It is, I think, the mercurial shifting that entrances me. There is no determining of meaning with these circuits. They are a constantly changing pulse of instinct and association.
N O T E S + N E W S
- Here is a link to my recent interview with The Weird Show.
- Nice bit of press for the Forecast show at The Institute Library in New Haven. At the opening I was instantly drawn to Adrinka Divination by Nadine Nelson, and the reviewer felt the same pull. I need to go back and spend more time with it. What a pleasure to have my work on the adjacent wall.
- I have two upcoming small group shows in 2026: in May at the Keyes Gallery here in CT and in July at AUTOMAT in my second hometown of Philadelphia, PA. More details to come. Right now with 20 inches of fresh snow outside my door it’s hard to believe in a future with spring and summer, but it will come.
- There are a few copies remaining for my print run of Goddess of Deep Self, seen below. The original is an analog collage on canvas; printed with archival ink on archival Hahnemuhle German Etching Fine Art Paper, it takes on another radiant life. One size only, 8.5 x 11 inches, cost per print is $65 plus tax and shipping. Send me a message if you are interested!
Thanks, as always, for reading. Wishing you beautifully renewing loops of creative voltage —
Lesley