The River Entered My Home is an exhibition by the Austin-based collaborative duo Hammonds + West. This body of work engages in what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self-interrogations, they question both individual and societal contributions to environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss. Objects lose their meaning as markers for a normal existence. The distinction between natural and human-made disasters starts to collapse.

Hammonds’ drawings reflect the melancholy and darkness manifest in West’s poems, asking the viewer to reexamine the impact of elements when human actions feed those elements. Hammonds often draws inspiration from a fire that consumed her childhood home in Independence, Kentucky, when she was 15 years old. In the context of climate change, that displacement takes on new meaning. Rather than being an aberration of the past, the incident foretells a potentially apocalyptic future.

West’s poems connect to the landscapes of ruin in Hammonds’ drawing, questioning our culture’s belief in limitless growth. Collapsing time, her speakers range across eras and historical events to try and articulate their role as witnesses in the first generation to feel the effects of climate change palpably (mere decades after global warming was first named). Her speakers work to name the complex spaces of responsibility and despair, understanding both to be necessary for hope and action.

As a collaborative team, Hammonds + West interweaves both image and text into multimedia installations and exhibitions. Combining sound with sculptural installation, video with drawings, and words with images, both artists offer their personal vantage points on the precipice of a forbidding future. Their work opens liminal spaces where hard boundaries dissolve: past disasters forecast future ones, the crackle of fire becomes the cracking of wreckage in water, and what is civilization becomes wilderness. They invite viewers to see their own daily part anew in making the physical world and, thus, the future of landscapes.

About the Artists

Hollis Hammonds is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from economic disparity and state violence to environmental degradation and human-made disasters. Her dystopian drawings and found-object installations have been widely exhibited throughout the U.S., including solo exhibitions at venues such as Women & Their Work in Austin, TX, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX, and the Reed Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Hammonds has been an artist in residence at McColl Center, the Ucross Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art & Design in the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts at Texas A&M University.

Sasha West is a poet and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University. Her most recent book, How to Abandon Ship, was a 2025 Kingsley Tufts Award finalist, won the Texas Institute of Letters Burdine C. Johnson Best Book of Poetry Award, andwas featured on The Slowdown. Her first book of poems, Failure and I Bury the Body, was a winner of the National Poetry Series, The Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush First Book of Poetry Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. Recent work has appeared in journals and anthologies including: American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Georgia Review, The Long Devotion: Poests Writing Motherhood, and Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency.

Together, their collaborative works have been exhibited at venues such as The Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design, the Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University, Artprize 2023, and The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX.