Tarisse King | 'Earth Cycles Coolamon, 2021' | 60x17x7cm

Code: DDSTK21218B

Artist: Tarisse King

Title: Earth Cycles Coolamon

Area: Darwin, NT (now New Zealand)

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Mild Steel Etched

Size: 60x17x7cm

Year: 2021

The Sculpture

This coolamon takes Tarisse King's Earth Cycles imagery off the canvas and into mild steel. It was made at the Murphy Foundry, which works with each artist to carry their painted imagery into new mediums. The design is etched directly from one of Tarisse's original Earth Cycles paintings onto the outside surface of the steel, so that every line, mark and tonal shift from the source work is carried faithfully across into metal. Across the long curved body of the coolamon, countless small elongated forms overlap and repeat, their edges catching the light differently depending on the angle, so the surface shifts from bright silver to soft grey as you move around it.

The coolamon itself is a traditional carrying vessel, used to hold food, water and even babies, and remains a central object in Aboriginal life. Here it is lifted onto a simple raised steel stand so the full etched surface can be read like a painting standing in the round. The choice of metal is deliberate. Steel speaks to strength and endurance, a material fit for carrying stories that have themselves been carried across generations.

The Story – Earth Cycles

The Earth Cycles series draws on the teachings of Tarisse King's father, who held that everything in life moves in circles, with no true beginning and no true end. Where her sister Sarrita builds the same theme in thick, textured paint, Tarisse works in flat, refined layers within the tonal range of a single colour, repeating circular forms across the surface with a precision that borders on the mechanical.

Etched into steel, that repetition becomes something closer to pattern than picture. The small repeated forms that cover this coolamon stand in for that endless cycling, each one close to its neighbour but never quite identical, a quiet record of her father's belief that life folds back on itself rather than running in a straight line.

Tarisse King is the elder sister of Sarrita King and daughter of the late William King Jungala. Born in Adelaide in 1986, she grew up in Darwin surrounded by the raw landscapes that fuel her art. She moved to Adelaide at 16 to begin painting, combining traditional Aboriginal techniques with her own contemporary vision. Now living in New Zealand as a mother of five, she feels the strongest connection between past and future — her art illustrating ancient culture with contemporary hopefulness.