Sarrita King | 'Rain, 2005' | 89x120cm

Code: DDSK05003

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Rain

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 89x120cm

Year: 2005

Sarrita King's paintings of rain belong to the same body of memory as her storm and water works - the monsoonal downpours of the Darwin top end, where the wet season arrives as a total event, transforming dry Gurindji country within days. Rain in her account is never a single line of water but a whole system in motion: it gathers, floods, travels underground and re-emerges, the same force that carried her ancestors' country before her and sustains it now. Her paintings render that movement rather than any single storm, built from the same layered dotting and fine linework she uses across her water and earth series.

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.