By Chris Bergeron via The Herald News

LINCOLN – Like artists who work with paint or marble, Lesley Dill and Ian Hamilton Finlay use words, signs and poetry to fashion intriguing art that explores the nature and meaning of language itself.

Sharing little but a willingness to provoke, they are exhibiting challenging bodies of work fashioned from wildly varied material at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

Together these two exhibits, “Lesley Dill’’ and “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Arcadian Revolutionary and Avant-Gardener,’’ bust the boundaries between generally separate disciplines such as printmaking and poetry, photography and sculpture, performance and provocation.

Conjoined rather than separated by a diagonal wall cutting through the Linde and Foster galleries, Dill’s and Finlay’s work complements each other’s in unexpected ways.

She’s tactile; he’s cerebral. He’s hermetic almost to the point of solipsism; compared to him, she’s the life of the party.

Dill is an American who once conceived and directed an opera based on Emily Dickinson’s poems. A crotchety Scotsman born in the Bahamas, Finlay spent years cultivating his 5-acre sculpture garden and temple in his native land.

Together, Dill and Finlay become one of the deCordova’s oddest artistic couples yet and deserve to be viewed as a must-see yin and yang of innovative creativity.

Often combining language with the human form in varied media, Dill is showing oil pastel drawings, bronze and paper sculptures and an imposing metal wall drawing.

This 20-year retrospective features 16 works made between 1993 and 2012 that reveal her longtime interest in language and images through works that incorporate both.

In this show, she uses words, especially poems by Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Salvador Espriu who wrote in Catalan and, more recently, Tom Sleigh, like pastel sticks or found objects to build her sculpted installations.

Dill is a bit like a one-woman collective who fashions unlikely materials into strangely beautiful objects that inspire contradictory responses.

Works like “Dreamer’’ from 1998 and “Girl with Wild Word Hair’’ from 2006, use bronze to depict hands and someone having a strange hair day reveal Dill’s tactility. You really want to touch them but you can’t – as long as a docent is looking.

They also suggest the sensory aspect of Dill as an artist who wants viewers to respond viscerally to work that’s both beautiful and a bit icky.

After all, “Innocent,’’ looks pretty much like a desiccated hand decorated with thread that might have been found in a headhunter’s hut in New Guinea.

Like a seamstress who uses poetry for thread, Dill has made several dresses that incorporate scraps of verse that imbue the sculpture with personal meaning.

An early work, “Hair Poem Dress’’ from 1993, features text from Dickinson sewn with horsehair into tea-stained, handmade paper. It looks crinkly like something Miss Havisham might have worn when tormenting Pip.

Dill’s largest, and, perhaps, most striking work, “Rush,’’ uses metal foil and wire to depict a seated man with a 60-foot long Kafkaesque cloudburst of text erupting from his back.

Viewers will disagree on whether the black text – “The tremendous world I have inside my head’’ – suggests creativity, bile and, maybe, the repressive conflicts that transformed Gregor Samsa into a cockroach in “Metamorphosis.’’

While incorporating highfaluting quotes into her work, Dill’s viewers might legitimately ask whether she’s making genuine use of Dickinson’s or Kafka’s words in their original spirit or they just happen to be the trendy artiste-du-jour.

After all, how many artists get exhibits or sales by transmuting Erich Segal’s “Love Story’’ into a museum show?

In his first exhibit in the U.S. since 1992, Finlay, who died in 2006, emerges as a fascinating artist who examined the structure and meaning of language in original work in several mediums.

Featuring more than 200 works including sculptures, prints, books, posters and poems, this is a sprawling and ambitious show that deserves a concerted look.

And while there’s more text than in most shows, the singular nature of Finlay’s art can be best grasped by understanding the cultural context from which it originated.

The exhibit includes several artist books he published after founding Wild Hathorn Press in 1961 which attempted to fuse language to sculptural form through works described as “concrete poems.’’

Believing consumerist culture had drained formerly vital symbols of their meaning, Finlay employed broadly recognizable signs of violence and authority, such as guns, tanks and guillotines to promote his own believe society must restore civic and aesthetic values.

Museum-goers have come to expect American artists whose careers are nurtured by curators, gallery owners and critics who communicate in an exclusive “art-speak’’ of shared class and background.

Not Finlay. An autodidact who served in World War II and a shepherd who became a poet, he was a crank and a genius who made genuinely original work aimed at reconciling nature and human society.

Though sometimes dense and demanding, “Ian Hamilton Finlay’’ offers numerous examples of profound and orginal work that reveals the breadth of a truly original thinker.

Chris Bergeron is a Daily News staff writer. Contact him at cbergeron@wickedlocal.com or 508-626-4448. Follow us on Twitter @WickedLocalArts and on Facebook.

“Lesley Dill’’
“Ian Hamilton Finlay: Arcadian Revolutionary and Avant-Gardener’’
WHEN: Through Oct. 13
WHERE: DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln
INFO: 781-259-3616; www.decordova.org