Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2017' | 75x90cm

Code: DDSK17050

Artist: Sarrita King

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Title: Lightning

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 75x90cm

Year: 2017

This work appears as the quiet reverse side of a canvas, a surface marked not with painted lightning but with the artist's own handprint pressed in deep pink, her signature scrawled in black, and the year inscribed below. It is an intimate trace of Sarrita King, a moment where the maker meets the made.

On the front, the painting belongs to King's celebrated Lightning series — her ongoing meditation on the electrical storms that defined her childhood in Darwin's tropical north. Growing up beneath skies that crack open with sudden violence, she watched lightning fracture the dark in patterns uncannily similar to the dry, cracked earth below. Her storm paintings hold that doubled vision: the sky's brief geometry mirroring the land's slow one, two languages of fracture speaking to each other across the canvas.

King describes wanting her storms to be almost audible, the driving rain, the sudden brilliance, the held breath between strikes. Between the dramatic forks she finds a subtler beauty, where atmosphere twists and turns and the elements briefly settle. This sensibility comes from a particular inheritance. As a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman and daughter of the late William King Jungala, she carries forward a family practice that fuses traditional dotting with the unorthodox methods her father developed, a continuation of ancestral narrative made present through contemporary hands.

The verso view shown here is its own kind of document. The handprint reads as both authorship and presence, a body confirming the body of work. Splashes of paint at the edges, reds, ochres, flecks of green and yellow — testify to a working studio, to colours that have travelled across many canvases before settling here. Linen weave, stretcher bar shadows, the soft accidents of process: this is the painting's private side, where the storm on the other face begins as gesture, as touch, as the artist's own mark before any image takes shape.