Adrienne Simmons is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Houston, TX. Drawn to real and imagined landscapes, she uses abstract imagery and found materials in an attempt to understand the connection between people and their places. She received her MFA from the University of Houston. Her work has been collected by UTMB, MD Anderson, and private collectors. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the LRT Gallery in Houston (2026) and was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center (2025), with past solo and group exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography, Elgin Street Studios, Hardy and Nance Studios, University of Houston Clear Lake, Lawndale Art Center, the Print Museum, and the Blaffer Art Museum.
My work is a response to the landscapes I visit. It does not simply portray the landscape—it is of the landscape, built from materials gathered on-site, such as rain, bayou, and sea water, sand, plant matter, and house paint. The work carries the parts of place not only in image but in form. The built frames and manipulated fabrics are snapshots in time, working much like the landscape photographer or painter, but embedding the site within the piece itself.
My process begins with maps—neighborhood grids, coastlines, roadways —and becomes an examination of permeability. These built and natural systems connect to the compositions of my work. I’m interested in what happens at the edges: the seams between places, between memory and forgetting, and between what is seen and what is held in the body. I think of these seams as ecotones, the fuzzy, fertile zones where two ecosystems meet. These thresholds, like memory and place, are never fixed.
Water has become a central presence in this work—not just as subject, but as a collaborator. I collect water from hurricanes, storms, oceans, snowmelt, and the bayou. It is mixed with my cyanotype chemicals; it stains my fabric, thins my paint, and blurs edges. It conceals and reveals. It remembers and erases. In this way, water helps me investigate the fixed and unfixed nature of both places and of memory.
In addition to canvas and built stretchers, the work uses domestic materials— house paint, bedsheets, fragments of my clothing, transparent silks—chosen for their ties to home, intimacy, and memory. These materials are all metaphors for what we try to hold on to and what we conceal and reveal. The interplay of transparent and opaque fabrics shows the internal support of the piece, bolstering the hope of holding onto a place or time, however futile.
The palette moves between dark, earthy tones and deep cyanotype blues—colors that reference the land itself. These are punctuated by moments of neon pink and saturated orange, which might act as a caution, marking the inevitable loss of memory and place. This contrast becomes a way to question what is buried and what insists on being seen.
image credit: KGMA at UH