Sarrita King | 'Earth Elements, 2025' | 30x60cm

Code: DDSK25183

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Earth Elements

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 30x60cm

Year: 2025

Sarrita King paints the ground as if seen from the wing of a low plane. Earth Elements reads as a stretch of Country in muted teal and slate, threaded with pale currents of white dotting that ripple across the surface like windblown sand or the slow shift of tide over shallows.

Long diagonal ridges cut through the composition. They act as spines, or perhaps the memory of a dry watercourse, dividing the field into panels of finely worked texture. Within each panel the dots gather and disperse in tiny eddies. Look closely and small currents appear, moving in different directions like grains caught in separate breezes.

This is part of Sarrita's ongoing meditation on the earth as a language. Every ripple, crack and drift of sand is a word in that vocabulary. She grew up in Darwin, watching the extreme weather and open ground of the tropical north, and her aerial view carries that childhood reading of the land. Her father, William King Jungala, was a Gurindji man of the Wave Hill Walk-Off generation. The techniques she uses were partly his, passed down and adapted.

The palette here is unusual for her. Cooler than the ochre works, closer to the surface of water at dusk or the shadow side of a dune at first light. The whites feel mineral rather than bright. There is a stillness across the whole canvas, but also a quiet movement, as if the ground itself is breathing.

A work to sit with. The longer you look, the more the surface opens into weather, distance and the slow patience of the land.