Los Angeles, May 30, 2025 — For artist Alexandra Hedison, the Palisades Fire that raged through Los Angeles earlier this year was more than just another headline about California’s increasingly devastating wildfires—it was a deeply personal loss. The fire, which tore through the Pacific Palisades in January 2025, claimed her childhood home in Malibu, a place that had been a cornerstone of her identity and a wellspring of inspiration for her acclaimed photography. Yet, even as the flames reduced her past to ash, Hedison’s art has kept the memory of that home alive, offering a poignant reflection on loss, memory, and rebirth. Her latest photo series, exhibited at Frieze Los Angeles in February, has not only captivated the art world but also sparked a broader conversation about the intersection of personal grief and creative expression in the face of natural disaster.

Hedison, a Los Angeles-based fine art photographer, filmmaker, and former actress, has long been known for her evocative work that explores the liminal spaces between tradition and novelty, often through conceptual representations of natural and architectural landscapes. Born in 1969 to actor David Hedison and Bridget Hedison, a production associate, she grew up in a creative Hollywood household, as noted in a 2020 Artworks Magazine profile. Her father, a 1960s soap opera star and James Bond ally in films like Live and Let Die, was also an amateur photographer, a passion that influenced Hedison’s own artistic journey. Her mother, a well-read thinker who might have been an academic in a different era, provided a balance of intellectual and artistic stimulation. This duality—right brain and left brain, as Hedison described in a The Genius List interview—shaped her approach to art, where she often grapples with the tension between memory and reality.

The Malibu home, where Hedison’s family lived from 1971 to 1980, was more than just a physical space—it was a formative landscape that defined her sense of self. “It’s a surprisingly strange feeling,” Hedison told Artnet News in February 2025, after learning of the fire’s destruction. “I identify so much of who I am, the way I see, and how I am as an artist from place and memory.” For years, she had returned to the beachfront property to photograph it, mining its sands and shifting vistas for her series Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The series, which she worked on over four years, combines multiple images taken from the same vantage point at different times, using various cameras and lighting conditions. “It’s probably 70 different images made into one,” Hedison explained, highlighting how the composite captures “the shifting of time and the sands and wind and the weather.” The resulting photographs, two of which were displayed at Frieze Los Angeles with Southern Guild, are hauntingly layered, questioning the nature of reality itself.

The Palisades Fire, which erupted in January 2025, was one of several devastating wildfires that have swept through Los Angeles in recent years, exacerbated by climate change, drought, and high winds. The Eaton Fire, which also struck the region around the same time, destroyed countless homes and livelihoods, as reported by Cultured Magazine. Artists like Ross Simonini lost entire bodies of work, while others, like Srimoyee Acharya, mourned the loss of personal treasures like solar panels installed by loved ones. Hedison’s childhood home, a beachfront property that held decades of memories, was reduced to rubble, as captured in a stark photograph by Vincent Walsh. “The place that I return to in my mind is now just truly in my mind,” Hedison reflected, a sentiment that echoes the broader grief felt by many Angelenos who have lost their homes to fire.

What makes Hedison’s story particularly poignant is the timing of the fire’s destruction. On the day the Palisades Fire consumed her childhood home, she was in the process of printing a large-format edition of Untitled #10 (Nowhere), a piece from her Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere series. “The photo was being birthed in the studio while the fires were removing the actual site,” she told Artnet News. The image, a composite of many photographs taken over time, captures the essence of the Malibu home in a way that feels both timeless and ephemeral. At Frieze Los Angeles, where the works were sold in editions of three for $17,000 and $15,000, viewers were struck by their ghostly quality—a visual elegy for a place that no longer exists in physical form.

Hedison’s art has always been about capturing the “in-between”—the spaces where transformation occurs, whether through time, memory, or physical change. Her earlier series, like Ithaka (2008), shot in North American rainforests, and The In Between (2017), which documented Parisian storefronts in transition, explore similar themes of flux and impermanence. In Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, she delves into the emotional terrain of memory, combining images to reflect how stories shift over time. “It’s very much the way we do with our own stories, the parts that we highlight, the parts that we obscure and obfuscate,” she explained. The series, which feels like it’s “disappearing” as you look at it, mirrors the cycle of birth, decay, destruction, and rebirth—a cycle made all too real by the fire.

Beyond the personal loss, Hedison’s work at Frieze also served a greater purpose. Proceeds from the sales of her photographs were donated to fire relief efforts, a gesture that aligns with her history of using her platform for good. As the wife of Jodie Foster, whom she married in 2014, Hedison has often shied away from the celebrity spotlight, preferring to let her art speak for itself. Yet, her visibility as part of a high-profile couple has given her a platform to advocate for causes she cares about, including support for the LGBTQ+ community, as noted in her involvement in a 2024 Armenian Film Society panel discussion. Her decision to contribute to fire relief reflects a deep connection to the Los Angeles community, a city she describes as “the finest place in America,” echoing the sentiments of other artists in Cultured Magazine who expressed love for L.A. despite its challenges.

The destruction of her childhood home has also opened a new chapter for Hedison’s art. “I’m desperate to go back,” she said, noting that recent rains and mudslides have made the area inaccessible. “The second I am able to get there, I will be shooting.” This pull to document the aftermath speaks to her ongoing exploration of loss and renewal, themes that have defined her career. Her 2005 series (Re)Building, created after her breakup with Ellen DeGeneres, used construction sites as a metaphor for emotional recovery, a process she described as finding “the roots of the earth” where she could “breathe.” Now, with the physical site of her childhood memories gone, Hedison is poised to create new work that grapples with this latest loss, potentially redefining her relationship with the past.

The broader context of the L.A. wildfires adds another layer to Hedison’s story. The fires have disproportionately affected the city’s creative community, with artists like Sunny Mills and Andy Ouchi losing homes, studios, and irreplaceable works, as reported by Cultured Magazine. Yet, amidst the devastation, there’s a sense of resilience and solidarity. Artist Asher Bingham, for instance, has been creating free portraits of homes destroyed in the fires, a project that has touched hundreds of lives, as noted by KCRW. Hedison’s contribution to fire relief through her art sales at Frieze mirrors this spirit of community, showing how creativity can heal even in the face of loss.

For Hedison, the loss of her childhood home is a profound reminder of the impermanence of physical spaces, a theme her photography has always explored. “This whole work is about birth and decay and destruction and death and rebirth all over again,” she told Artnet News. Her photographs, which capture the shifting sands of Malibu over years, now serve as a time capsule—a way to keep the memory of her childhood home alive, even as the physical site has been erased. The ghostly images on display at Frieze are more than just art; they’re a testament to the power of memory, a way for Hedison to hold onto a piece of her past while creating something new from its ashes.

As Los Angeles continues to grapple with the aftermath of the 2025 wildfires, Hedison’s story resonates as a symbol of resilience. Her art not only preserves the memory of her childhood home but also offers hope to a community rebuilding in the wake of disaster. For Hedison, the journey forward will undoubtedly involve returning to the charred remains of her past, camera in hand, to document the next chapter. And for those who view her work, the message is clear: even when fire takes everything, art can keep the spirit of what was lost alive, ensuring that the past continues to inspire the future.