Christina Mrozik has spent six years developing her most ambitious project yet: a fifty-card oracle deck built around what she calls an emotional ecosystem. Each card in the deck explores emotional territory through her signature visual language of plants and animals, rendered in monochrome and populated by surreal pairings — turtles with eyes set into their shells, a bird pierced by a slender tree, an alligator’s open jaw giving way to a lily pad. The deck is meant to function as a companion for self-reflection rather than a corrective tool, designed to help someone witness their feelings, understand their purpose, and build a relationship with their inner world, not to fix anything about themselves.
Her process is famously unhurried and layered. Every drawing takes between twenty and forty hours to complete, built up gradually from rough sketches through form research, composition refinement, and a slow pencil rendering that continues until the image feels resolved. That patience extends across her broader practice, where decades spent observing the natural world, shaped early on by the habitats along Michigan’s Grand River, feed into a distinctive style built from ink, marker, watercolor, and richly pigmented acrylics. Her lineage draws on the tradition of early naturalist illustrators like Audubon alongside visual storytellers such as Rackham, treating each drawing almost like a portrait that helps make sense of a subject’s history.
What unites her body of work is a consistent negotiation between opposites. Flora and fauna become stand-ins for the simultaneous, often contradictory matters of the human heart, letting the external world of plants and creatures carry the weight of internal emotional complexity. That duality has long been central to how her pieces are read: splendor and decay are shown coexisting in the same frame, with creation and death moving together rather than being kept apart, so that the balance and contrast running through the work only becomes clear once it’s studied closely. It’s a sensibility she’s carried from earlier illustration work with activist collectives into gallery shows and now into a tool meant to sit somewhere between art object and personal ritual.
More info: Website, Instagram.
in Bahia.