Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2025' | 50x60cm

Code: DDSK25346

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 50x60cm

Year: 2025

Sarrita King grew up under the tropical skies of Darwin. The wet season storms there are famous. Sheet lightning splits the horizon. Forks crack down in white heat. This canvas holds that memory.

Fine white strokes radiate outward from bright cores, fanning across the surface like the after image of a strike burned into the eye. Between them, dark veins branch and rejoin. They read as lightning bolts. They also read as the cracked earth left behind after the rain has gone. King has spoken about this doubling. The sky writes on the land, and the land answers back.

The mark making is unorthodox. King learned traditional dotting from her Gurindji Waanyi heritage, then developed her own methods with her late father William King Jungala. The result here is more like weather than pattern. Thousands of small directional strokes build up static and pressure. Each cell of the composition pulses outward from its own centre. Stand close and the surface hums. Step back and the whole sky is moving.

The Lightning series is one of King's most recognised bodies of work. She calls her broader practice the language of the earth, the idea that every crack, burn and ripple is the country speaking. This work sits inside that thinking. It is Darwin in the build up, rendered in monochrome so the energy carries the whole painting. There is drama in the strikes and a quieter beauty in the drifting rain between them. Both are held on the one canvas.