Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2023' | 90x180cm

Code: DDSK23155

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 90x180cm

Year: 2023

Ngurra means home, or Country. Sarrita King paints it from above. The canvas opens onto a warm field of ochre and gold, pulsed with concentric rings that spread like ripples through sand. Each ring is a waterhole. Each waterhole is a meeting place.

King grew up in Darwin, surrounded by the weather and open ground of the tropical north. Her father, William King Jungala, taught her that the earth has its own language. These soft, radiating centres are her translation of it. The fine white lines that web the surface read like dried riverbeds, cracked clay, or the lightning she watched break across the sky as a child.

Look closely and the brushwork turns. Thin, raked strokes spin around each pale heart, catching light the way wind catches the top of a dune. The effect is quiet but alive. You can almost feel heat rising from the ground.

The waterholes carry particular weight for King. They mark the places her Gurindji and Waanyi ancestors travelled to, from Katherine through the desert toward Mt Isa. Natural waterholes gave life. People gathered at them, rested at them, left their marks on the ground around them. Here those sites sit in conversation across the canvas, linked by the fine veining of the land itself.

King works in the lineage of her father while making something distinctly her own. Her mark is loose, confident, and modern. Ngurra is a wide, generous view of belonging. A map read with the body as much as the eye. The land speaking in its own tongue, and an artist who knows how to listen.