“Gift to Life” is a public art installation that takes shape from an intimate and universal gesture: the original bond between mother and child.
A bond that here becomes sign, matter, and shared memory.

The project began in 2018 through the involvement of local school children, invited to express—through drawing and clay modeling—their relationship with their mother: the figure who gives life, who welcomes, protects, nourishes, and guides.
Each terracotta tile preserves a childlike, spontaneous, and authentic gaze, transforming a personal experience into a collective narrative.

Clay, a primary and ancient material, deeply connected to the earth and to manual craftsmanship, becomes here a metaphor for the body, for generation, and for transformation. After firing, the fragile mark of the drawing becomes durable, destined to endure over time as a memory impressed into the urban space.

In its later development, the work expands and is completed through the addition of new circular elements and abstract signs, conceived to dialogue with the original pieces and with the renovated wall surfaces.
These elements do not imitate the children’s gesture, but embrace it: they surround it like orbits, cycles, breaths. The circle returns as a symbol of continuity, origin, and return, echoing the natural rhythm of life.

In this phase, the work introduces a new material and stylistic research:
each surface is treated as if it were a large “embroidered” wall or crocheted surface—a dense texture of marks, reliefs, and micro-modules that recall the patience and wisdom of traditional handmade practices, echoing the gestures of grandmothers and cultural memory.

The tiles are not mere decorative inserts, but sensitive fields of light and shadow, where the time of making settles into the material.
The mark becomes texture, skin, breath. Surfaces seem to grow like living organisms, intertwining order and irregularity, gesture and listening. Craftsmanship becomes language: a slow, repetitive, almost meditative act that restores an intimate dimension to the work, despite its public nature.

The stairway thus becomes a narrative body: a traversable place that preserves traces, affections, and generational passages.
The walls are not simple supports, but living surfaces where the artwork dialogues with stone, with time, and with spontaneous vegetation that emerges without being erased.

“Gift to Life” is not a celebratory monument, but a work that quietly offers itself to the gaze of passersby.
An invitation to recognize in the creative act a gesture of care, and in public space a place of relationship.

Here, art does not impose itself: it is given.
Like life itself.

Installation by Santina Alleruzzo and Filippo De Mariano

L'Opera si trova in Via Lavacro dei Saraceni - Santa Lucia del Mela (ME) - Sicily

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