Her style, a mixture of modernism and abstraction, is described by Adams as "yield[ing] more to qualities than ideas, more to matter than its naming".
[7] Her first solo exhibition at Zabriskie was described in the New York Times as "quiet, but intense," while simultaneously abstract and "filled with lyrical allusions".
[9] In 1960, Dore Ashton asserted that Pat Adams's works detail her "visual experiences of nature and her spiritual insights about the cosmos".
[10] Ashton places Adams in the same category as artists like Odilon Redon and Mark Tobey, in that they each "seek to find what is 'within' the inmost secrets of the universe".
[10] Hilton Kramer further noted that Adams has a "mystical temperament" and is "extraordinarily inventive in conjuring up a world of delicate perceptions and inward feelings".
Martica Sawin's essay accompanied this exhibition, in which she describes Adams's paintings Arriving, (1994) and Late, New, Again, Round (1985) in the same in much of the same context as Ribbons of Breath.