Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2024' | 90x150cm

Code: DDSK24185

Artist: Sarrita King

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Title: Lightning

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x150cm

Year: 2024

Across this expansive canvas, Sarrita King renders the electrical theatre of a tropical Top End storm. Jagged dark seams fork and branch across deep teal and midnight fields, the fractured geometry of Lightning echoing the cracked earth below. King has often spoken of how a sky split by lightning resembles ground split by drought, two opposing elements drawing the same lines, the earth and atmosphere speaking in a shared visual grammar.

Growing up in Darwin, King was shaped by the primal weather systems that announce the wet season, towering thunderheads, sheet lightning illuminating the horizon for hours, and the percussive drumming of rain on tin roofs. The Lightning series translates those embodied memories into paint. Here, dense fields of finely worked dotting build a shimmering, almost vibrating surface, suggesting both the static charge of the air before a strike and the curtain of driving rain that follows. The jagged seams divide the picture plane into organic cells, each radiating outward from a quiet centre, the calm eye within the chaos.

The palette is wholly nocturnal: deep cobalt, ocean teal, ink-black and flashes of brighter aqua where light briefly breaks through. Up close, the surface dissolves into thousands of individual marks; from a distance, those marks resolve into the broad sweep of weather seen from above, an aerial reading of Country that has become a hallmark of King's practice.

As the daughter of the late William King Jungala and a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman, Sarrita carries forward a family painting language while charting her own course. She fuses the traditional dotting technique with unorthodox methods inherited from her father, producing works of unusual depth and movement. Lightning belongs to her broader meditation on the Language of the Earth — the idea that every crack, ripple and burst of light is the land communicating its story, if only we slow down enough to listen.