Adrienne Defendi is a visual artist whose work explores the cyclical, the ephemeral, and the fragility of life. Her lifelong interests in memory, narrative, and materiality inform her photographic expression and artistic process. Employing different mediums, from analog to alternative processes, printmaking, and pewter casting, her practice charts elements of loss and ritual, and the boundless possibilities within reiteration and experimentation. An award -winning artist, Adrienne has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has curated several photo-based exhibitions, most recently Unmoored at Chung 24 Gallery and Our Mothers Ourselves: Legacies That Shape Us at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. She is currently an artist-in-residence with the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, CA, and a 2026 AIR at the KALA Art Institute. Artist Statement: As a visual artist, I am fascinated by accumulated mounds, remains, loss, and marks of absence. In the aftermath of the CZU Lightning Complex fires (August 2020) in the Santa Cruz mountains, I documented the charred landscape, forests, and residential properties, and tracked their steady transformation. In my art practice, I am interested in how repetition can be generative, fragmented and recomposed, intimating the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal. In Big Basin, I was drawn to the numerous brush piles and admired their own unique beauty and architectural structure amassed by those who care so deeply for the park’s revival and sustainable future. Brush piles remind me of burial mounds, marking loss and remembrance and transformation: fallen and burnt botanical matter gathered to be burned in fire prevention management. And in response, I created photographic “bricks” depicting a variety of mounds and brush piles, fused with beeswax in sedimentary layers of burn-scar charcoal ash and botanicals. Each photographic sculpture can stand alone, yet in the act of placing one brick upon another, I commemorate loss in the hope for collective renewal. Mounds, piles, and debris mark presence, impending absence, and care – it takes labor to collect loss, to chart it, to mend it. While creating these works, I consider my own impact and vulnerability, presence and absence, ultimately surrendering to the processes of transformation.