Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2025' | 40x40cm

Code: DDSK25231

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 40x40cm

Year: 2025

Sarrita King's Ngurra paintings take their name from the Gurindji word for Country, home or place. Rather than depicting a single site, they carry the wider rhythms of her family's land in the Territory: the cracking of dry earth, the movement of water, shifting vegetation and the pathways that cross the ground. Built from layered dots, lines and repeating circular forms, each Ngurra work lets different traces of Country surface gradually, so that memory, belonging and the land's own changing character sit together on the one canvas.

This canvas is worked almost entirely in warm reds and burnt orange, with a paler golden ochre pushing through at the centre like light breaking through cracked ground. Cream-white lines radiate outward from six or seven distinct points, each ringed by tight concentric bands and scattered with small raised dots, so the surface reads like a cluster of pools or gathering places connected across the field.

King builds the composition from thousands of fine parallel strokes, each running between the radiating centres, broken here and there by thicker cream pathways that snake diagonally across the canvas like tracks worn into the earth. The dotting is dense but irregular, some clusters tight and bright, others loosening into scattered marks that let the red ground show through, giving the surface real depth and unevenness rather than a flat repeating pattern.

From across a room the painting settles into a single glowing field of red and gold, the radiating circles reading as a constellation of places within one Country. Up close it opens into intricate, disciplined mark-making - every line hand-drawn, every dot placed, the pathways between the circles suggesting movement across the land rather than a static map.

Sarrita King is a Gurindji Waanyi woman who grew up in Darwin, immersed in the extreme weather and elemental landscapes of the tropical north that ground her art. She is the daughter of the late William King Jungala, whose Gurindji people led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, and the younger sister of fellow artist Tarisse King. Combining traditional dotting with unorthodox methods passed down from her father, she builds surfaces of striking depth exploring lightning, fire, water and the textures of Country from an aerial view - work that carries ancestral narrative into the present.

Sarrita King is a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman, born in Adelaide in 1988. She is the younger sister of Tarisse King and daughter of the late William King Jungala, whose Gurindji people led the famous Wave Hill Walk-Off — Australia's first successful land rights claim. Growing up in Darwin, Sarrita was immersed in the extreme weather and primal landscapes of the tropical north, which became the foundation of her art. She began painting at 16 and combines traditional Aboriginal dotting techniques with unorthodox methods inherited from her father, creating works of extraordinary depth capturing lightning storms, fire, sand dunes, and the textures of the earth from aerial perspectives. Her art is a fusion of past and present — the next generation keeping ancestral narrative alive.