Monika Marozienė doesn't just photograph the sea — she literally infuses her prints with it by pouring pine resin into them. A practice as unique as the artist herself.
Monika Marozienė doesn't photograph the world—she distills it. Trained in chemistry, with a master's degree in chemistry and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, she spent years filling what she herself describes as "a void where art should have been." Photography was that answer, and since then, the two disciplines have been inseparable.
The gesture that defines her practice is as simple as it is unexpected: she melts pine resin onto her prints. This process, both technical and intuitive, lends her works a rare physical presence. The surface undulates slightly, vibrates, and takes on a subtle golden hue. The photograph ceases to be a flat image and becomes an object one almost wants to touch. The resin used is not fossilized amber—Marozienė insists on this point—but it shares its essential properties: it protects, preserves, and evokes the Amber Coast, the Baltic coastline of the Curonian Spit where the artist grew up, between shifting dunes and the ever-present sea.
It is this childhood landscape that nourishes her most accomplished project, Woman and the Sea . The black and white photographs depict female figures in stark maritime environments. There is no explicit narrative, no demonstrative effect: just a suspended atmosphere, bodies that seem both to inhabit the space and to withdraw from it. The sea is never frontal—it acts in the background, like an underlying breath. We sense its rhythm in the lines of composition, its presence in the silences between the forms.
For Marozienė, the women she photographs are complex entities—"powerful, mysterious, fragile, ironic, poetic," she says—like the Courland Arrow itself, both serene and wild. This vision owes much to her grandmother, a central figure in her childhood, whose femininity blended delicacy and audacity. This gentle irony and understated melancholy are present in every image: a personal, instantly recognizable tone, further accentuated by the black and white, which widens the gap between reality and its representation.
The resin then alters this perception a second time. Its slightly amber hue introduces a warmth that the black and white had previously distanced. It acts like a surfacing memory, a lingering summer light. But it also has a concrete chemical function: as an antioxidant, it slows the deterioration of the print, preserving it indefinitely. This dimension is not insignificant. It situates Marozienė's work within a reflection on time—on what endures and what fades—that runs throughout his entire oeuvre.
This consistency was quickly recognized internationally. In 2024, she won first place in the Fine Arts category at the Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA) for her project Woman Is Like The Sea , as well as first place in the Fine Art Photographer of the Year category at the Monochrome Photography Awards. That same year, she also received a silver medal at the Prix de la Photographie de Paris (Px3) and the Budapest International Foto Awards (BIFA), along with awards at the One Eyeland and Exposure One Awards and an honorable mention at the International Photography Awards (IPA). Her work has also been featured at the Trieste Photo Days, confirming the growing interest in her practice.
In a photographic landscape saturated with ephemeral and immaterial digital images, Monika Marozienė's work reminds us that photography can still be a physical experience—a resilient surface, an object with its own memory. Each print carries within it a piece of time, Baltic light, and patient chemistry. Less an image than a trace: fragile, persistent, profoundly human.
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