Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2016' | 90x120cm

Code: DDSK16101

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 90x120cm

Year: 2016

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 storms of the north: the movement of rain and wind, and the charge held in the air. 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. Each storm she witnessed offered new patterns and colours, 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.