SYLVIA MEKHITARIAN: DRAWING ON STONE, MARKING THE WORLD.
A Curatorial Review
Sylvia Mekhitarian is an Australian printmaker and visual artist currently based in the Blackall Range, Queensland, whose practice is almost entirely organized around stone lithography — one of the most demanding and technically precise of all printmaking methods — applied to subjects of urgent environmental and social concern. The combination is not accidental: the geological weight of limestone and the alchemical transformation that makes an image drawn in grease print in ink seems entirely apt for an artist whose principal subjects are environmental degradation, ecological fragility, displacement, and the conditions of human and non-human life on a planet under pressure.
Sylvia takes her inspiration from her environment, the influences and issues of social structure and their impact on human condition. Her work is primarily done in printmaking: intaglio, solar plate, stone lithography, relief, and collagraph. First she spends some time building up her images — pictures she recollects in her mind are then revealed by the marks she makes on paper or directly onto the plate. The process of recollection before mark-making is significant: this is not observational printmaking or documentary reportage, but something more interior — images that pass through memory and feeling before they reach the stone surface, carrying the distortion and intensification that memory imposes.
She experimented with printmaking techniques and since 2017 has worked with lithography, spontaneously drawing directly onto the stone surface and marking using special crayons and tusche wash. Tusche — the greasy black liquid used in lithography — can be applied with brush or pen, washed over large areas, drawn into, allowed to pool and dry in unpredictable ways. Used alongside crayon, which allows finer, more controlled mark-making, the two tools create a dual register within a single composition: spontaneous atmospheric areas and deliberate linear structures existing in the same surface. The black ink and gold leaf combination visible in works like Disintegration adds a further material tension — gold, the traditional signifier of value and permanence, pressed against images of breakdown and loss.
Sylvia loves to draw — she has concentrated for the past several years on stone lithography, where she draws immediately onto the stone surface. The immediacy of drawing directly on stone, without the mediation of a digital or photographic transfer, is what distinguishes her approach from much contemporary printmaking. The mark on stone is irreversible in a way that digital work is not: it commits, it accretes, it cannot be undone without grinding the surface back. This irreversibility introduces a quality of risk and decision into the drawing process that print made through transfer or digital intermediary cannot possess.
The Spirit exhibition presented an exploration of process on the lithography stone, drawing part from memory and how it translates automatically onto the stone — a series of lithographs provoking a question of human interaction with nature. The phrase "translates automatically" is
exact: the drawing does not replicate the mental image but transforms it, the stone imposing its own conditions, the chemistry of the process intervening between intention and result.
The current work organizes around several series, all thematically interconnected. The Environmental Degradation series — including Disintegration, Omnipresent, and Desolate — addresses the condition of the natural world under human pressure. The Trees series (End of Life, Where is Arcadia, What Remains is the Ghost of Time, Preserve) treats specific trees and forests as both subjects and metaphors: the individual tree as emblem of the forest, the threatened forest as emblem of the planet. The titles themselves operate as compressed arguments — Where is Arcadia asks about the loss of the pastoral ideal; What Remains is the Ghost of Time implies that time itself may become a ruin; Preserve carries both imperative and elegy. The Humanitarian series — Bounding for Freedom, Exerting Control Over Nature — brings human displacement and coercion into the same frame as environmental destruction, treating them as related symptoms of the same structural condition.
The artist perceives her creations as imperative conduits through which contemporary narratives, especially those surrounding global environmental shifts, can be communicated and contemplated. Mekhitarian, through her art, endeavors to offer not only a visual feast but also a platform upon which critical reflections regarding our contemporary existence are served with a side of insightful and thought-provoking dialogues.
For collectors, this is a practice of genuine technical distinction and serious ethical commitment — stone lithography of a kind that is increasingly rare, applied to subjects that are central to the most important conversations of our time.
Despina Tunberg Curator
World Wide Art Books and Artavita
Wwab.us and artavita.com
CURRENT Work
Sylvia takes her inspiration from her environment; influences and the issues of social structure and its impact on human condition.
Prints: Series, Environmental Degradation.
Stone lithography black ink gold leaf.
Degradation
Prints: Series, Covid-19.
Stone Lithography.
Black Ink image. Face covid -19. 38.05x56cm.
Etching.
Coloured ink. Arrived. 9.03x3.05cm.
Drawings
Patient 1, 2, 3 & 4.
Prints: Trees.
Stone Lithography & Drypoint etching.
Drypoint
Green ink image: Open. 20x26cm
Stone Lithography
Black ink images: Measured, 26x43cm. QLD Fires, Lamington National Park, 9x67cm. Finish off with hand painted red dots on print, End of Life, 35x50cm. Stone-Curlew (sketch of bird on the stone). Where's Arcadia, 35x50cm. What remains is the ghost of time, 35x32.07cm. Preserve, 29.07x42cm.
Prints: Series, Humanitarian.
Photo of framed work:
Members exhibition at Impress15, printmakers community Brisbane. And traveled to Kingaroy Regional Gallery.
Stone Lithography.
Black ink images:
Bounding for freedom, 42x32cm
Exerting control over nature, 42x32cm
Prints
Black ink images:
Exerting control over nature, 38 x28cm.
Bound for freedom 24x16cm
A Curatorial Review
Sylvia Mekhitarian is an Australian printmaker and visual artist currently based in the Blackall Range, Queensland, whose practice is almost entirely organized around stone lithography — one of the most demanding and technically precise of all printmaking methods — applied to subjects of urgent environmental and social concern. The combination is not accidental: the geological weight of limestone and the alchemical transformation that makes an image drawn in grease print in ink seems entirely apt for an artist whose principal subjects are environmental degradation, ecological fragility, displacement, and the conditions of human and non-human life on a planet under pressure.
Sylvia takes her inspiration from her environment, the influences and issues of social structure and their impact on human condition. Her work is primarily done in printmaking: intaglio, solar plate, stone lithography, relief, and collagraph. First she spends some time building up her images — pictures she recollects in her mind are then revealed by the marks she makes on paper or directly onto the plate. The process of recollection before mark-making is significant: this is not observational printmaking or documentary reportage, but something more interior — images that pass through memory and feeling before they reach the stone surface, carrying the distortion and intensification that memory imposes.
She experimented with printmaking techniques and since 2017 has worked with lithography, spontaneously drawing directly onto the stone surface and marking using special crayons and tusche wash. Tusche — the greasy black liquid used in lithography — can be applied with brush or pen, washed over large areas, drawn into, allowed to pool and dry in unpredictable ways. Used alongside crayon, which allows finer, more controlled mark-making, the two tools create a dual register within a single composition: spontaneous atmospheric areas and deliberate linear structures existing in the same surface. The black ink and gold leaf combination visible in works like Disintegration adds a further material tension — gold, the traditional signifier of value and permanence, pressed against images of breakdown and loss.
Sylvia loves to draw — she has concentrated for the past several years on stone lithography, where she draws immediately onto the stone surface. The immediacy of drawing directly on stone, without the mediation of a digital or photographic transfer, is what distinguishes her approach from much contemporary printmaking. The mark on stone is irreversible in a way that digital work is not: it commits, it accretes, it cannot be undone without grinding the surface back. This irreversibility introduces a quality of risk and decision into the drawing process that print made through transfer or digital intermediary cannot possess.
The Spirit exhibition presented an exploration of process on the lithography stone, drawing part from memory and how it translates automatically onto the stone — a series of lithographs provoking a question of human interaction with nature. The phrase "translates automatically" is
exact: the drawing does not replicate the mental image but transforms it, the stone imposing its own conditions, the chemistry of the process intervening between intention and result.
The current work organizes around several series, all thematically interconnected. The Environmental Degradation series — including Disintegration, Omnipresent, and Desolate — addresses the condition of the natural world under human pressure. The Trees series (End of Life, Where is Arcadia, What Remains is the Ghost of Time, Preserve) treats specific trees and forests as both subjects and metaphors: the individual tree as emblem of the forest, the threatened forest as emblem of the planet. The titles themselves operate as compressed arguments — Where is Arcadia asks about the loss of the pastoral ideal; What Remains is the Ghost of Time implies that time itself may become a ruin; Preserve carries both imperative and elegy. The Humanitarian series — Bounding for Freedom, Exerting Control Over Nature — brings human displacement and coercion into the same frame as environmental destruction, treating them as related symptoms of the same structural condition.
The artist perceives her creations as imperative conduits through which contemporary narratives, especially those surrounding global environmental shifts, can be communicated and contemplated. Mekhitarian, through her art, endeavors to offer not only a visual feast but also a platform upon which critical reflections regarding our contemporary existence are served with a side of insightful and thought-provoking dialogues.
For collectors, this is a practice of genuine technical distinction and serious ethical commitment — stone lithography of a kind that is increasingly rare, applied to subjects that are central to the most important conversations of our time.
Despina Tunberg Curator
World Wide Art Books and Artavita
Wwab.us and artavita.com
CURRENT Work
Sylvia takes her inspiration from her environment; influences and the issues of social structure and its impact on human condition.
Prints: Series, Environmental Degradation.
Stone lithography black ink gold leaf.
Degradation
Prints: Series, Covid-19.
Stone Lithography.
Black Ink image. Face covid -19. 38.05x56cm.
Etching.
Coloured ink. Arrived. 9.03x3.05cm.
Drawings
Patient 1, 2, 3 & 4.
Prints: Trees.
Stone Lithography & Drypoint etching.
Drypoint
Green ink image: Open. 20x26cm
Stone Lithography
Black ink images: Measured, 26x43cm. QLD Fires, Lamington National Park, 9x67cm. Finish off with hand painted red dots on print, End of Life, 35x50cm. Stone-Curlew (sketch of bird on the stone). Where's Arcadia, 35x50cm. What remains is the ghost of time, 35x32.07cm. Preserve, 29.07x42cm.
Prints: Series, Humanitarian.
Photo of framed work:
Members exhibition at Impress15, printmakers community Brisbane. And traveled to Kingaroy Regional Gallery.
Stone Lithography.
Black ink images:
Bounding for freedom, 42x32cm
Exerting control over nature, 42x32cm
Prints
Black ink images:
Exerting control over nature, 38 x28cm.
Bound for freedom 24x16cm
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