WINNER

A wave caught at the edge of breaking, painted with a depth that pulls you under. Named for Calypso's mythic island, Ogygia holds the sea as a threshold rather than a view — luminous, turbulent, and utterly assured. In its dark water and rising green light, Marina finds the exact moment where the ocean stops being a place and becomes a possibility. The work that stayed with us.

@marinasyntelis - www.marinasyntelis.com

2ND PRIZE

The sea floor rendered as memory. In Dream Sediment, Tatiana builds her surface in layers — sediment, salt, shell, and shadow — until the painting seems less made than accreted, something the tide left behind. Up close it keeps giving, each pass of the hand revealing another buried detail. A work that rewards the patient eye and quiet attention.

@tanyahellumart

3RD PRIZE

Ocean plastic, reborn as data. Bottle caps recovered from the sea — reshaped by tide, salt, and sun — are photographed and rebuilt into a pixelated field, an archive of waste imagined as the archaeology of a future age. PLX DATA ARC MATRIX is the boldest idea in the competition: a work about the ocean, the screen, and everything we leave behind, holding beauty and warning in the same grid.

@pimlicoartsjapan

FINALIST

Weightlessness made of metal. Juergen's Floating Jellyfish suspends a delicate storm of fine wire and glass into the drifting, trailing form of a jellyfish mid-current. Fragile and precise, it captures the strange grace of a creature that is almost more water than body — the sea's quietest architecture, held still.

@jf_artdesign

FINALIST

A single fish surfacing from a field of blue static. Drawn from a body of experimental photograms first made in the darkroom and carried, decades on, into moving image, AQUÁTICOS VII has the shimmer of something glimpsed underwater — half-form, half-memory. Beatriz treats the aquatic as a place of experiment and chance, where the image is always still becoming.

@beatrizfinkielsztejn

FINALIST

A body suspended in green light, mid-dialogue with the water around it. In A Conversation with the Sea, Madeleine photographs the human form underwater with a painter's softness — hair unfurling, limbs loosening, the surface shivering overhead. It is exactly what the title promises: not a struggle against the sea, but a quiet exchange with it.

@madelaine_fogliani

FINALIST

Fire on water. Burning catches the sea at the instant sunlight turns a breaking wave to molten gold, the crest streaked with what looks like living flame. Malte finds the ocean at its most elemental and paradoxical — water that seems to catch fire — and holds that impossible moment steady long enough for us to look.

@schreiblicht

FINALIST

An octopus wrought in gold leaf and deep blue, coiled at the centre of its own dark tondo. In Apollo, Sarah gives a creature of pure intelligence and motion the weight of an icon — metallic, luminous, almost devotional. The circular frame turns the sea's most elusive mind into something to be contemplated, like a portrait of the deep itself.

@sarahjacksonartist