Sarrita King | 'Lightning, 2026' | 30x30cm

Code: DDSK26122

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Lightning

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 30x30cm

Year: 2026

Ngurra is the Gurindji word for Country, home or place, and in Sarrita King's hands it becomes less a picture of one site than a response to the rhythms that move across the land itself. These works gather the cracking of dry earth, the movement of water, shifting vegetation and the pathways that cross the ground into a single surface, built through layers of dots, lines and repeating forms. Nothing in them is literal. They are memory and belonging worked back into paint, a sense of place carried through pattern rather than through any single view.

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.