Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2008' | 190x400cm

Code: DDSK08009

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 190x400cm

Year: 2008

Sarrita King's Lightning paintings are a painted memory of the electrical storms of the Darwin top end, where she spent her youth. Among her earliest memories are the movement of rain and wind and the charge held in the air before a strike. She describes lightning cracking across the whole sky in lines not unlike cracked earth, while the wind whips dust, rain and heat into a maelstrom. Every storm she witnessed revealed new patterns and new colour, which is why no two works in the series share a palette.

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.