Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2026' | 60x60cm

Code: DDSK25356

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 60x60cm

Year: 2026

Sarrita King grew up in Darwin, where the wet season arrives with a violence that shakes the horizon. Her Lightning series returns to those tropical storms. The memory of white bolts splitting the sky, and the strange calm that follows.

Here the canvas is broken into cells by heavy blue veins. Each cell holds its own burst of light. Fine white strokes radiate outward from a central point, the way lightning forks and forks again before it hits the ground. The effect is close to cracked earth seen from above. King has spoken about this doubling before. Lightning across the sky reads like the fissures that heat leaves in dry clay. Sky and ground answering each other.

The palette stays cool. Slate, storm blue, chalk white, a wash of pale grey where the rain thins out. Look closely and the marks shift between water and electricity. Rain sheeting sideways. Static crackling through humid air. The heavier arteries between the cells feel like the pause between strikes, when the whole landscape holds its breath.

King is the daughter of the late William King Jungala and a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman. She learned dotting from her father and then pushed it into her own territory, working with unorthodox tools to build these charged, aerial surfaces. Her painting sits inside a wider idea she calls the language of the earth. Every crack and ripple is the country speaking.

A quiet, electric work. It reads differently in morning light than it does at dusk, which feels right for a painting about weather.