Sarrita King | 'Earth Elements, 2026' | 120x205cm

Code: DDSK26099

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Earth Elements

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 120x205cm

Year: 2026

Sarrita King's Earth Elements works draw on the freshwater pools and waterways of the Northern Territory, and on the elemental forces that shape her Country. Circular forms gather across the canvas as pools and soakages, joined by the patterns water makes as it collects and travels through the landscape. Layers of fine dotting carry that movement across the surface, following water through the Territory's seasonal extremes - held still through the dry, then rising to reshape the terrain when the wet arrives.

Here the canvas splits into two great bodies of colour. Above, a deep blue-black sky, dense and layered, meets a rolling green-blue sea below, the two divided by a single bright, cracked line of white where the water catches the light. King builds the whole surface from countless small dots and dashes, laid in curving bands that rise and fall like swell moving across open water.

The dotting is worked in tight, repeating arcs, each line following the one before it so the paint reads as motion rather than mark. In the lower right a pool of paler green opens where fine white lines radiate outward from a single point, echoing the soakages and waterholes that recur through this series. Elsewhere the surface darkens into deep blue-green, broken only by the pale threads that trace its underlying structure.

From across a room the painting settles into two calm fields of colour meeting at a luminous horizon. Close up, it becomes an intricate network of hand-drawn lines and thousands of individual dots, each one placed with the same steady discipline, building water's slow architecture across the canvas.

Sarrita King is a Gurindji Waanyi woman who grew up in Darwin, immersed in the extreme weather and primal landscapes of the tropical north that ground her practice. She is the daughter of the late William King Jungala, whose people led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, and the younger sister of Tarisse King. Combining traditional dotting with unorthodox methods inherited from her father, she paints lightning, fire, sand dunes and water as expressions of Country seen from above - a fusion of past and present carrying ancestral narrative into the present.

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.