Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Smoke Toad incense burner

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

Marina Kozak
2025
Ceramic, glaze, and metal 
4” wide x 4” high x 3” deep, (including the incense plate burner)

About the Artwork 

Print & Object is honored to announce the release of Smoke Toad, Marina Kozak’s most recent project developed through the imagined lens of a fictional, secular, ancient spiritual cult.

By working within an imagined mythology, Kozak explores how magic, symbolism, and narrative can provide solace amidst the repetitions of daily life. Smoke Toad is both object and offering: a vessel of ritual designed to hold the weight of our inner burden and born from a secular religion unbound from the burdens of historic, organized religion. 

The Smoke Toad is the first in a trilogy of talismans conceived as companions on a journey toward radical self-acceptance and the idea of living with one’s demons. The Smoke Toad represents depression not as an enemy to be eradicated, but as a companion to be acknowledged.

According to its lore, one may write down their troubles and feed them into the toad’s mouth; in turn, the creature consumes and holds these woes, glowing as it exhales the burdens into expulsion. Through this act, heaviness is replaced with a ritual of rest and renewal.

Symbolically, each gesture, the writing, the feeding, the burning, guides its keeper from fog back into embodied presence. Each Smoke Toad is individually slipcast in clay, detailed by hand, and finished using the raku process, a ceramic technique known for its unpredictability and elemental intensity. With no surface alike, their uniqueness testifies to imperfection as beauty, and to healing as acceptance.

A companion on the journey toward radical self-embrace, Smoke Toad offers a space for ritual and reflection, a reminder that living with our shadows is itself a form of light. Print & Object is proud to present Smoke Toad exclusively on our platform.

About the Artist

Marina Kozak is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and designer. She has worked with
brands like Radio Flyer, collaborated with artists such as Björk, shaped visual identities as the
the Design Director of Pitchfork, and most recently created Finestra—a deck of surreal
conversation prompts.

Her practice brings old and new into tension, drawing on historic and occult references and
reframing them through a contemporary surrealist lens. The resulting objects and installations
blur the boundary between functional design and ritual artifact.

Artist retains copyright and all licensing privileges to the artwork. Do you have questions about purchasing your artwork? Click on our FAQ page.