Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2023' | 90x180cm

Code: DDSK23155

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x180cm

Year: 2023

Ngurra means home, or Country. Sarrita King paints it here as something seen from above, the way a bird might read the land or the way memory folds a place into pattern. Pale gold light pools across the surface in soft circles. Around them, fine white lines web outwards like the cracked skin of clay pans after the wet.

King grew up in Darwin, under storms and heat and the long dry that follows. Her father William King Jungala taught her to look at the land as a living archive. The Gurindji people, his people, walked off Wave Hill Station and won the first successful land rights claim in Australia. That inheritance sits underneath everything she paints.

The concentric halos here belong to her Language of the Earth thinking. Every ripple, burn mark, and fissure is the ground speaking. She works with a fine brush and layers of dotting, blending traditional technique with methods her father showed her. The result reads almost topographic. You can imagine waterholes glowing under sun, or the shimmer of heat rising off a claypan at midday.

What holds the eye is the balance between softness and structure. The glowing centres feel warm and quiet. The webbed lines feel ancient and precise. Together they build a picture of Country as something both intimate and vast, a place lived on for tens of thousands of years and still speaking to those who know how to listen.

A meditative work from one of the most collected contemporary painters of her generation.