GAIA FUGAZZA
Alice, I’m curious to share some ideas about my work, titled Mother of Millions. When I describe it, I explain that it takes its name from the plant, which is also called “Devil’s Backbone.” Still, the title often confuses people—especially those who haven’t seen the sculpture in person. They associate “mother” with a woman and often describe the work as depicting a female figure. But to me, it’s simply a body—one whose gender I don’t know, and didn’t intend to define. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to speak with you—because of your work, perhaps you could say more about your own practice.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
I’m very interested in talking about this work and your idea of it as a “monument to care,” and how that complicates what care means. I’m a psychotherapist working within, while also critical of, the psychoanalytic tradition. I also write and teach about psychotherapy, and I’m particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality. Many of my clients are queer or trans, so I often find myself thinking about what is or isn’t considered masculine or feminine, maternal or paternal. These are central ideas in psychoanalysis—concepts that have been examined, critiqued, and reimagined many times. I feel your piece offers a rich ground for conversation around these themes. Can you tell me about the creation of the piece?

GAIA FUGAZZA
When I first started thinking about what would later become the work, I spent some time in an artist residency in Val Taleggio, in the Orobie Alps, hosted by an organization called NAHR – Nature, Art & Habitat Residency. NAHR engages with the environment by inviting artists and architects to reflect on ecological issues related to mountain landscapes. While I was there, I realized that what is often perceived as a natural Alpine landscape actually bears the traces of human presence—one that stretches back thousands of years and has long shaped the terrain.
In recent years, the population in the Alps—particularly in those areas—has declined. This depopulation, which runs counter to trends in other parts of the world, has had what many consider a negative impact on the environment. Humans traditionally played an essential role in maintaining the ecological balance of the mountains—for example, bringing cows and other animals from the valleys up to the higher pastures. Keeping these pastures open at certain altitudes was important for biodiversity, since those fields are rich in flowers, insects, and small plants. Now, as people leave, forests are reclaiming those high-altitude meadows. Yet the forests that grow there are not always native; they often consist of species that colonized the area more recently. Their canopies can be very dense, preventing much from growing underneath.
While I was there, I also realized that, as the native population has declined and aged, a new population has arrived—primarily asylum seekers. Their presence has brought new life to these mountain communities: there are children again, and different people who have come to live there, perhaps not by choice, but there nonetheless.
Drawing inspiration from these two realities—and from the plant Mother of Millions (Kalanchoe Draeigmontiana), which is a succulent native to Madagascar (so not at all native to the Alps)—I created this sculpture. The plant fascinated me because it reproduces asexually, generating small plantlets on its leaves that generate other plants when falling to the ground. The leaves reach upward toward the sky like open arms. It reproduces in a way that is different, almost defiant, and I wanted to make a kind of monument to care and to the strength that comes from care. It’s also, I suppose, a monument to a kind of reproduction that happens differently, that doesn’t question how or why it takes place—it just continues.
The sculpture is a body made of fired impruneta clay. Its form brings together elements from many different bodies. It has the feet of a baby; its pose suggests a snake rising or a yoga posture. The feet are chubby, the ankles soft, while the arms and back are strong and muscular. The body has a softer lower part, a small breast, and the other side of the chest is flat. The neck is broad, the hair short and uneven, and the arms hold a cluster of small, developing creatures—similar to the main body, but not yet fully formed. It’s as if the figure is “pregnant” through the arms; a mother not of the womb, but of gestures and touch. There is no womb, no genitals, no defined sex.
I read an article you wrote some years ago, “Making Breasts, Making Meaning: Psychoanalytic Metaphors and the Real.” I found it fascinating, especially what you said about the metaphors used in psychoanalysis, and how those metaphors can feed back into the perception of the physical body present in space.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
In that piece, I was thinking about the psychoanalytic metaphor of the breast—the “good breast” and the “bad breast”—as a way of describing how a baby experiences care or the absence of it. As a metaphor, the breast can stand for many kinds of care: being held, feeling safe, being nurtured. But we often find it hard to stay within the metaphorical; it tends to slip into something literal—such as the idea that it’s good to breastfeed and bad not to, or that babies need mothers and female caregivers. Those ideas can easily become prescriptive—that bodies should look a certain way, or that breasts must be protected because they are the “location” of care.
Originally, the metaphor was meant to describe a much broader sense of care—something relational and open-ended. I’m very drawn to psychoanalytic metaphors; thinking in metaphor is part of how I work. And that’s something I also see in your work: the sense of gesture, of figures, and of the metaphorical relationships between elements. But I also wonder what these metaphors do. It’s interesting how you said that your sculpture is often perceived through the lens of “the mother” or “the woman.” It’s as if the viewer can’t help but impose another breast onto the figure, or imagine genitals that aren’t there—layering their own assumptions about motherhood or femininity onto the work.

GAIA FUGAZZA
I think there’s a big difference between people who have only read about a piece and those who have experienced it in person. When people see only photographs, it’s easier for them to follow the title—Mother—and immediately assume: “Mother is a woman.” But for me, Mother is a carer, perhaps, or maybe not even that. I don’t know what Mother is. It’s simply the name of a plant, and the plant itself has no gender. The installation raises a series of questions: Who takes care? Who is the care directed at? Who is assigned the obligation of care?
Working at this scale was new for me. Being in the presence of something larger than myself, I began to feel the surface of it—the skin, the flesh—almost as a landscape. It becomes undeniable, it has weight. It’s very different from smaller works, which can be grasped more easily—visually or even physically—and be thought about from a distance.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
That idea of what a mother is makes me think of the theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who writes extensively about mothering. She’s interested in “mother” as a verb rather than as a figure, a role, or an identity. For her, “mothering” is something we all can do, should do, or at least have the capacity to do. It isn’t necessarily about wanting or having children.
I think that connects to some of the ideas about nature and the environment in your work—the sense of responsibility to mother the world, the planet, and the people and beings we’re in relation with. It doesn’t have to belong exclusively to the role of “the mother” or “motherhood.” Gumbs asks, “What would it mean for us to take the word mother less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation?”
I was thinking of what you said earlier about people taking animals up and down the Alps. That, too, can be seen as a kind of “mothering technology”—a form of tending, of caring through action rather than a fixed role.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Yes. Yesterday I was reading the article you wrote with Iggy Robinson, “Queer Relationships: Unmapped Intimacies.” In it, you write that “queer families are formed but not fixed.” You describe how these relationships are always in a state of becoming, because there isn’t a fixed model for a queer family—no established precedent, no parental model, no predefined framework such as marriage. They keep changing. And this awareness of continuous making and remaking makes change itself more acceptable.
That made me think about certain ideas of conservation as they apply to nature. Nature, culture, landscape, and language are all constantly in flux. So, when we talk about “preserving” or “protecting” an environment, a culture, or a language, it’s always a political choice—a decision to fix something that is, by nature, dynamic.
For instance, when we say we want to return a damaged landscape to its “natural state,” that state is itself a construction—a specific historical moment that we choose as reference. This doesn’t mean that restoration or care for the land is meaningless. On the contrary, it’s essential. But to insist that a landscape should look a certain way, or be inhabited only by certain people because they were there before, or by certain animals because they were there before, is a political stance like any other. There is no perfect, original state of nature. And when such claims are made, they often carry quite conservative—even fascist—undertones.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
That makes me think about my work as a therapist and the fantasy we sometimes have that we can return someone to a state of pure wellness—that we can undo the harm, go back to the past, find the problem, and undo it. But that’s impossible. The therapeutic relationship can change things, but what it does is always unfold something new.
Still, that wish—to return to some mythical, pure time—runs deep. It lives inside us.
When you were showing me images of your figure, I was struck by how you described painting the landscape across the body. Would you talk about that a bit?

GAIA FUGAZZA
Originally, I planned to make the sculpture using a different clay—a sandy yellow stoneware—but I soon realized that wouldn’t be technically possible with the kiln that I was using. So I decided to work with impruneta clay instead, which is a very simple clay made of mashed-up soil. It contains many impurities, and the salt content rises during the firing but there was too much of an association with plant pots since that’s the most common use for this clay. So I modeled it leaving it rough, with the imprints of my fingers, so that the salt content would be more visible. I also intervened with powdered pigments and carving on the surface of the body. I portray images of the transumanza, the seasonal migration of animals from the valleys to the higher pastures, and of the many elements involved in that movement: the flowers of the high pastures, the dogs, the sky, the people, and the cows. It became a portrait of this action, of the landscape and the bodies that shape it, spread across the sculpture’s surface. These traces, impressed into the clay, evoke an archaic language, recalling the memory of rock carvings as the first gestures with which human communities inscribed their presence in the world.
What began as a technical intuition grew into something that I appreciated conceptually as well. When you enter the barn, you’re not only facing a body with a landscape painted across its back; the backdrop itself—the barn, the mountain—is equally important. The landscape is both around and upon the body, and the body becomes a setting for something else to happen. There’s a kind of reciprocal projection between the landscape and the body, between the body in the landscape and the landscape on the body. It reminds me how permeable we are—to our environments, to other creatures, to one another.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
I love that idea of reciprocity, of things shifting back and forth. When you say “mother of millions” in the Alps, it feels as though the Alps themselves are the mother of millions. But then people become the ones tending the mountain, mothering the environment. The mountain is nature, yet humans act as its technology—and at the same time, the mountain becomes a kind of human-made environment, or at least a metaphorical one.
That movement back and forth is always fascinating to me. I wanted to ask you about the gesture in the piece—the rising up—because it feels both technically challenging and deeply evocative. The figure isn’t quite standing, but it’s not solidly sitting on the earth either; it’s held in this suspended, in-between moment.

GAIA FUGAZZA
I think the position would not be possible for a real person. It’s a mix of several poses.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
That’s interesting, because when I first saw it, I thought, “maybe I could do that for a second . . .” though, of course, I couldn’t. But there’s a fantasy there: the self rising up with these powerful arms, holding everything for just a moment.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Maybe some very trained people could do it—I can almost do it myself—but what I wanted in the image was to have relaxed feet, playfully grounded. The sculpture was built starting from the feet, then the knees, which remain attached to the ground. The thighs rise up from there. They were built separately, and the biggest technical challenge was whether the two legs, coming from opposite directions, would meet correctly at the hips.
They did. And from that point on, the piece became one single form. The rising begins from the hips upward. The arms, which carry all these small creatures, look—and are—very heavy. That’s also part of the sculpture’s power. It reminds me of a bird—when its wings are lowered, they’re too heavy to move, but when raised, ready to fly, there’s a sense of potential, of stored energy.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
And those little figures along the arms—the leaflings?

GAIA FUGAZZA
The small figures are only half formed. They don’t yet have proper arms or fully developed features. They are sprinkled with yellow pigment, almost like pollen. They seem to be engaging with one another—talking, lying across each other, dangling—like a group of children or kittens. They’re unaware of the effort it takes to be carried, or of the effort it takes to grow. Each has its own task, its own process of becoming, yet they grow together, occupying the whole space.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
In psychoanalysis, we often talk about the maternal not as an identity but as a capacity—something one can have at certain times, can lose, or can offer to others, whether you’re a male, non-binary—regardless of gender. Part of that capacity is to create a facilitating environment, a space in which something can happen or develop—to be present enough and absent enough, in balance.
The arms and shoulders of your sculpture seem to offer such a space: a place to rest, to grow, to be supported. The small figures embody that dynamic beautifully. I’m also struck by the gesture of rising up. I sense in it both optimism and effort. Is this piece, for you, a gesture of hope—of potential—or is it more about the strain, the labor of holding everything together?

GAIA FUGAZZA
I think it’s both. I hope the sculpture feels hopeful—celebratory even—of acceptance, care, and change, of a shared future that doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.
It also relates to the tradition of the classical monument—not necessarily classical in the Greek sense, but in the sense of public sculpture. When I received this commission, I initially wanted to make small works in nature. But then I thought: I’m a woman making a sculpture in a village where there are no monumental works. Monuments like this usually celebrate individuals—usually men—who are depicted standing, alone and heroic. So I wanted to create a monument to something else. And I wanted it to be placed in a barn, not in a town square. Even that decision—along with the choice, on the part of the museum, to organize a biennial across mountain villages rather than in a major city—already speaks to a different vision of the future.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
When you said that the piece is, in some way, about acceptance of change—about care, and about transforming into something unexpected or not held as a pure form—that really resonated with me. Much of my work is about that, especially with queer and trans people. There’s this idea of change and transformation happening in ways that are uncertain, unexpected, or not yet known. Something is shifting, but we don’t know yet what it will become. There isn’t a clear path that a queer relationship or a trans body will follow—and yet, there’s something solid, even life-giving, in that uncertainty. So much discourse around transness or non-normative life still frames it as if it’s “against nature,” as if it’s an attack on nature or something pure or stable. But, as you said, we’ve always had a technological, creative, transformative relationship with our environment and our own bodies. Recognizing that feels meaningful to me—it opens things up, makes them more alive.

GAIA FUGAZZA
In your writing, you speak about the anxiety that some people feel toward transitioning bodies. And that’s something I’ve often be puzzled about. Because some people seem to believe in a strict individualism while simultaneously they can feel profoundly challenged by another person’s change.
You describe it as wish for a return to something fixed, but what’s inspiring, to me, is the possibility that transitioning opens for everyone when we think of bodies as constantly evolving and transforming. In your work, you also connect this to surgery—sometimes related to gender transition, sometimes to cancer, or to other medical reasons. I love that idea of an alliance across these experiences—that we’re all changing in many ways and we all can choose or not choose to intervene in different ways.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
Yes, in that piece I was writing about several kinds of bodily change—trans bodies, particularly top surgery, and also mastectomies after breast cancer—and about how differently those things are often perceived, even though they stir a similar anxiety. They bring us into contact with something that feels threatening: our own mortality, or simply the fact that bodies can be so different, that our bodies could be different.
When you said you didn’t quite understand that anxiety, I wondered if it’s because of how much you work with clay. There’s a pleasure in working with something that can be moved and reshaped. That act of creating bodies—literally forming them—keeps you close to the excitement of transformation. Of course, there’s anxiety and loss in change, but there’s also a sense of possibility.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Yes, exactly—what’s new that might come? How exciting. Without denying the suffering or difficulty, there’s also celebration: what fantasies can I have, what ideas, what changes are possible? I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’s true that the materials I use—clay, wax, paint—are all very responsive. They give immediate feedback. I plan very little in advance; I feel like there are some archetypes of images that become works when they get embodied in the material, and the material guides me in different directions. Without that encounter, that unexpected moment, I would not know how to make works.
Some materials—like beeswax or squid bones—also imply a kind of care over time. They need to be looked after by whoever handles the work later. Squid bones, for instance, are fragile; if they break, someone will have to eat a new squid and clean it and replace the bones. Wax, too, has to be kept at a certain temperature—not too cold, not too hot—something close to human body temperature. The physicality of the medium transforms the idea itself.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
That’s so close to what I was trying to explore in my text “Making Breasts, Making Meaning.” As a therapist, I’m always wondering: How can we pay attention to what our metaphors, our theories, are doing—to how they shape the ideas we bring into the room? Often we try to make people’s experiences fit into the theory, when instead we should be feeling something out together, letting it take shape.
It’s a profession that doesn’t involve physical touch, but there’s a kind of psychic touch to it—the same kind of play you describe with clay. We’re working something out, testing how it might move or hold together.
When you mentioned those fragile materials that require care, I connect to that too. Everyone in the therapy room is both things at once: a malleable, changing material that can be worked with, and a delicate, irreplaceable object that must be handled gently. Your words really made me think about the physicality of a process that, on the surface, is “just talking.”

GAIA FUGAZZA
I wanted to ask you about that. In your psychoanalytic practice, your work is all based on language, right? There’s no movement, no physical contact. But if you’re working with people who are in the process of changing their bodies—physically changing—it must also feel very embodied.
Of course, everyone changes. We all age; we make different choices about how to modify our bodies—through exercise, diet, plastic surgery, or even just a haircut. But some people are more consciously engaged with those questions. It’s not even a matter of being a trans person, it’s about changing your body.
So I wonder: When a client comes to see you one week and then the next, do you feel that they’re different? Do they move differently, look different, sit differently?

ALICE KENTRIDGE
That’s such a good question. Yes, my practice is based in speech—there’s no art-making or physical contact—but I’ve always resisted that framing, the idea that therapy is only speaking. There’s so much else happening in the room: the simple act of being with another person, of being with another body.
Even when we’re just sitting together, there’s a whole layer of non-verbal work—the way we inhabit space, how comfortable we are sitting near one another, how someone’s energy feels. A client may be talking about one thing, but on another level I’m listening to how they feel in the room, how their body feels, how we’re oriented to each other. In the therapy room there is lots of talking about the body and changing the body, fantasizing, imagining, worrying, planning some practical steps, finding out information. But sometimes a person will come in wearing something they’ve never worn before, or just feeling different. Nothing has changed externally, but they feel different in the room, they sit in my mind in a different way.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Could you tell me something more about this idea of mothering?

ALICE KENTRIDGE
In psychoanalysis? It’s a mixed tradition. On the one hand, there’s this almost clichéd idea that psychoanalysis blames everything on the mother—it’s both a joke and, in some ways, a reality. The discipline often looks back to the early roots of people’s experience, emphasizing that early caregiving relationships are crucial. This led to much thinking about mothers as causes or solutions, but in both cases as objects rather than subjects.
Then came the feminist critique, which insisted that mothers are people with their own psyches and histories. That opened up a richer understanding of the dynamic between mother and child, rather than focusing solely on the child’s experience.
There’s also, as you were suggesting, a move to remove the necessarily gendered aspect of mothering—to see mothering as something one does.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Yes, gendered but also biological. I spent much of my childhood with my grandparents, so their mothering was certainly relevant to my upbringing—just as other carers can be.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
Exactly. Much of the critique concerns how psychoanalysis has positioned mothering as gendered, reinforcing the nuclear family and overlooking other caregiving relationships in which one might be nurtured. Some of the theory can be quite harsh toward mothers.
When you train as a psychotherapist, you think deeply about what mothering means because, in some sense, that is the relationship you enter into with a patient. And, of course, men train as therapists too. In that sense, Freud himself might be seen as the ultimate “mother of millions.”
It’s an interesting profession—one with a conservative history regarding the masculine and feminine, the maternal and paternal—but also one that has long been practiced in an un-gendered, un-biological, and symbolic way. It allows the concept of the mother to become metaphoric and fluid, available for reinterpretation.
There has also been considerable reflection on maternal ambivalence—on mothers not simply as nurturing, life-giving forces, but as figures also full of envy, complexity, and sexuality.

GAIA FUGAZZA
The plant I used is commonly known as Mother of Millions or Devil’s Backbone. I had it in my studio, grown from just a few small plantlets I found by chance. It spread everywhere. I began to understand that double meaning—the sense of fertility, even excess, and the anxiety surrounding the uncontrollable power of reproduction. It’s something one can admire, but also fear.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
Yes, that tension between the two names is fascinating. When you were speaking about asylum seekers, I was thinking about how certain kinds of mothers are highly valued in society, while others are not—seen instead as excessive, as “too much,” or somehow suspect.

GAIA FUGAZZA
I’m not sure it’s only about mothers. In Italy more broadly, there’s been concern about low population growth—especially in the mountains, where schools have closed because there are no new children. At the same time, immigration is treated as a problem. So one wonders: Which is it that people want—population growth, or a certain kind of population growth? These are real challenges. Integration and meaningful social participation require effort, but I think that it’s possible to achieve something positive.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
When I was thinking about your work, another theorist came to mind: the psychoanalyst Lisa Baraitser, who has written extensively about maternal subjectivity—the lived reality of being a mother. She also writes about time, particularly in her book Enduring Time, which explores concepts often associated with motherhood. The chapters of the book are titled: Staying, Maintaining, Repeating, Delaying, Enduring, Recalling, Remaining, and Ending. They are all about what it means to stay with something, to endure something difficult or apparently unendurable. There’s a sense of strength, but also of laborious, repetitive, sometimes hopeless effort, which makes me think of your sculpture.
Baraitser speaks of a “maternal death drive.” In Freud’s model, the maternal is associated with life and reproduction—the sustaining forces of society—while the death drive is the pull toward non-existence, dissipation, fragmentation, or destruction. Baraitser suggests a maternal reading of that death drive: the possibility that these forces coexist. Sometimes what we do, she says, is simply accompany a process of decline. To give birth is also, in a way, to accompany a child toward death—though one hopes never to witness it. The idea of being with something that you can’t fix. Perhaps that’s my less optimistic reading of your sculpture. There are things we cannot fix but we can still know about and be with them.
In Enduring Time, Baraitser describes a woman who repeatedly visits a man on death row. She cannot change his situation or the unbearable duration of his life, yet she continues to return. There’s some pull to just keep going back and being with him in it. Baraitser also talks about psychoanalysis as a very slow, repetitive time where maybe something is changing, but you can’t really see or feel what it is, and it feels like it might stretch on for a long time.

GAIA FUGAZZA
I think about relationships in a similar way. One of the questions I often return to is: Which relationships matter most in a life? In a conservative tradition, the nuclear family—the relationships of mother, father, child, husband, wife—takes precedence and it must be protected from intrusion and invested in, because it carries genetic continuity and the promise of a future. But to look beyond it—to value other bonds—is often seen as transgressive. Yet many relationships can matter just as much. The role of mother can be assumed by different people; a friend can be more important than a partner.
I don’t believe that the nuclear family must be defended at all costs. I say this as a mother of two biological children, but I recognize that political discourse has grown increasingly fixated on this ideal, as if to remind people to care only about that unit.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
Yes, this closed model of the nuclear family contrasts with your Mother of Millions, which opens the gates.

GAIA FUGAZZA
Indeed. In Italy, for example, the government recently decided to remove sex education from schools. There have also been troubling cases concerning the removal of some rights of lesbian mothers. When one hears talk of the “natural family,” it raises questions: What is natural in relationships, in bodies, in gender? Even the word “natural” can be dangerous. It can be used to justify exclusion or violence against those who do not fit its narrow definition.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
I’m glad you brought up the present political moment. It feels heavy—with intensified anxieties around refugees, queerness, transness. Yet your work also gestures toward a much longer timescale. When you speak about the Alps, you evoke a place with deep human history, which somehow lifts that weight. The sculpture’s strong arms feel resolute—as if to say, “It’s a difficult time, but we endure it together.” There’s a sense of holding on, of mutual support. It’s moving. I’d love to encounter the figure in person.

GAIA FUGAZZA
You should. Stand before it for a moment. The work is installed in a barn—the kind used for storing hay. These structures are the historical architecture of the Alpine valleys, originally housing animals, especially cows. They typically have two floors: the upper, more spacious level for hay, and a lower, cave-like space for the animals during winter. Traditionally, the floor between them is made of thin bamboo-like slats, allowing the animals’ breath to dry the hay above.
For Italians, often raised within Catholic symbolism, the barn recalls the Nativity—the manger warmed by the breath of the cow and the donkey. To find there not Mary and Jesus but a naked, ambiguous creature lends the space a strange sacredness. The barn begins to resemble a temple. When I was making it, I was also thinking of the monumental Buddhas—figures seated cross-legged within small architectural frames. Those sculptures are vast within their confined settings. My work carries a similar resonance, evoking religious reference without belonging to it.

ALICE KENTRIDGE
I love that ending. A wild, alien Mary. A scene of asexual reproduction in the barn.