Havana (Cuba), 2020

Water surrounds everything. There is no shore, only a liquid horizon where a head emerges, suspended between the need for air and surrendering to the drift. Its ambiguity confronts us: is survival floating or fighting against the current?

The female figure rising from the water embodies the battle for mental health. Captured in that crucial instant between suffocation and breath, the image crystallizes the tension between surrender and resistance. Like the mind, the sea oscillates between being an abyss or a refuge, sharing a vital rhythm: the necessity of balance to sustain life.

In Ocean, the sea transcends its role as a backdrop to become a spiritual space, a territory where the woman faces her own emancipation. The work reminds us that the ocean does not merely surround us—it breathes with us, raising an ecological call: its preservation is inseparable from our existence.

Ocean captures that moment of struggle: a woman before the abyss, resisting, anchored to her own essence. It is a fleeting instant between oppression and freedom, between sinking and surfacing, where the sea itself becomes the voice of her liberation.

María Pérez Marín