Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2016' | 90x120cm

Code: DDSK16101

Artist: Sarrita King

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Title: Lightning

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x120cm

Year: 2016

Across this canvas, the sky cracks open. Lightning belongs to Sarrita King's signature meditation on the electrical storms that haunt Darwin's tropical wet season, those volatile nights when the heavens split into rivers of white-hot light and the air hums with charge. Here, that fracturing energy is rendered as an aerial map of fissures, each black seam tracing the path of a strike as it forks and forks again across the dark.

The palette burns. Deep oxblood and crimson smoulder beneath flares of ochre and olive, suggesting both the bruised colour of a storm-lit horizon and the parched, cracked earth that lightning so often resembles from above. Sarrita has often spoken of this twinning, the way a sky splintered by lightning mirrors the dry land below, as if the same primal language of rupture runs through everything. In this work, sky and ground collapse into one continuous skin.

The mark-making is unmistakably hers: dense, radiating strokes that fan outward from hidden centres, built up in the unorthodox dotting technique she inherited and reinvented from her late father, William King Jungala. Each cell of colour pulses with its own weather. Look closely and you can almost hear the work, the hiss of driving rain, the dry roar of thunder, and then the strange hush between strikes where, as Sarrita describes it, elements gracefully twist and turn.

A proud Gurindji Waanyi woman raised among the extreme weather of the Top End, Sarrita carries an ancestral narrative into contemporary form. Her storms are not only memory but inheritance, the earth speaking in its own visual tongue, and the painter listening. Lightning is a study in intensity and stillness held inside the same frame: chaos beautifully patterned, the moment of the strike suspended forever across the canvas.