Sarrita King | 'Ancestors, 2026' | 120x180cm

Code: DDSK26120

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ancestors

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 120x180cm

Year: 2026

Sarrita King's Ancestors paintings speak of presence carried through land rather than through figures. The dense dotting stands for the countless markings and patterns that gather on Country over time, sand hills, vegetation and pathways woven together with the traces of generations who came before. Waterways moving beneath the surface patterns suggest continuity, the same sources of water that sustained earlier generations still nourishing the land and its people today, so that past and present are held together within the one surface.

Sarrita King is a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman, born in Adelaide in 1988. She is the younger sister of Tarisse King and daughter of the late William King Jungala, whose Gurindji people led the famous Wave Hill Walk-Off — Australia's first successful land rights claim. Growing up in Darwin, Sarrita was immersed in the extreme weather and primal landscapes of the tropical north, which became the foundation of her art. She began painting at 16 and combines traditional Aboriginal dotting techniques with unorthodox methods inherited from her father, creating works of extraordinary depth capturing lightning storms, fire, sand dunes, and the textures of the earth from aerial perspectives. Her art is a fusion of past and present — the next generation keeping ancestral narrative alive.