Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2025' | 25x31cm

Code: DDSK25357

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 25x31cm

Year: 2025

Ngurra means home, or Country. Sarrita King paints it here as a living organism, seen from above, its heart beating out in concentric rings of pale blue on a deep teal ground.

The lines read like the growth rings of an ancient tree, or the ripples pushed out from a stone dropped in still water. They could just as easily be a topographic map. Sarrita often speaks of the earth having its own visual language, and this work is a quiet translation of that idea. Every ring is a record. Every mark holds time.

Cutting across the rings are longer, wandering lines. These are the pathways. Waterways, songlines, ancestral routes that thread through the land her Gurindji forebears walked for tens of thousands of years. They do not follow the rings. They cross them, older than the surface pattern, running their own quiet course beneath.

The palette is unusual for her. Ocean blues and mossy green replace the ochres of the desert, hinting at the tropical north where she grew up. There is weather in this painting. Humidity, perhaps, or the sheen of rain on stone.

Sarrita began painting at sixteen, learning from her father William King Jungala. She has kept his methods and made them her own, working the surface with tools and gestures that feel almost geological. The result is a work that hums with patience. Sit with it and the centre pulls you in, then the pathways carry you out again, back across Country.