The Whimsy of Adele Marie
- Alana McCarthy Light
- Jan 7
- 2 min read
The experimental folk sound of Adele Marie’s surrealism exists harmoniously with the multimedia artist’s ethereal contour linework drawings. Accumulating Montgomery County artist grants, contributing her visual works to auctions for Gaza, designing t-shirts, playing an array of DMV venues and receiving an artist residency at Baltimore art space Le Mondo, Adele Marie boasts a prolific creative CV.
Adele Marie, a performance artist in presentation, humbly reveals an operatic voice while masterfully looping instrumentation on synths held up by cans of beans and on guitars.
Venturing into making her own music videos, Adele “bought a big white muslin backdrop, initially for the purpose of creating shadow choreography.” She would like to implement the backdrop into her live performances.
Although already making visuals for her first experimental track “Breathing Tremolo," the song has a new video in the works in collaboration with filmmaker Matthew Vargas. A 2026 artist-in-residence position at Le Mondo will also incorporate Adele’s combined film, music, and visual art visions.
The backdrop also “ended up to also be useful as just a partition.” Privacy, an element vital to Adele Marie’s creative practice, along with time and space constraints of her living situation, inspired Adele to DIY her own studio space in her Maryland abode.
A singer since early childhood, Adele Marie first learned guitar from her mom at 13 years old, starting on a steel string. “I got very frustrated with it, I gave it up for a year, and came back to it. She let me play her classical guitar. That's when I really fell in love with guitar, because of finger picking.”
In vocation, Adele works full-time as a music therapist and has researched how improvisation impacts the brain. She found that self-monitoring in the brain, a deactivated section processing the self and one’s personality, gets activated when experienced musicians improvise.
Despite many obligations, Adele emphasizes making time for her side hustles, including music and visual art. She mentioned that, “I didn't know I could draw until a high school art teacher taught contour line drawing.” Adele has created her own logos and put the artwork on t-shirts using iron-on transfers, and recently, Adele donated five drawings to an art auction that supports Gaza.
Her favorite DMV artists include the bands Deep Space Sugar, Worm Wagon and Quiet Room, as well as designer Beane Beane and photographer Eta. “I'm thankful for all of the support and kindness and passion that people have shown me in the artist communities,” Adele expressed.
Adele hopes to receive another grant soon, “to expand on my creative endeavors as a form of self-care so I can sustain a life of service. It's so important to balance giving to others, but also giving to ourselves and reassuring ourselves. It's not easy to do, but it's something that I think [is done] with sort of daily reflection [and] discipline.”
Comments