William King Jungala | 'Celebration Of Life, 2005' | 58x86cm

Code: DDWK05064

Artist: William King Jungala

Title: Celebration Of Life

Area: Darwin / Katherine, NT

Community: Gurindji

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 58x86cm

Year: 2005

Concentric rings roll across the canvas like stones dropped into still water. Each circle is built from careful dotwork, ring upon ring, with smaller satellite circles tucked into every gap. The surface reads as one continuous field. Look longer and the rhythm shifts, pulling your eye from one gathering place to the next.

William King Jungala painted Celebration Of Life in warm earth tones. Ochre golds sit against deep charcoal browns, with flecks of copper catching between the dots. The palette feels grounded in Country. It carries the colour of dry earth after sun, of bark and worked stone.

Jungala was a Gurindji man whose people led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the land claim that reshaped Indigenous rights in this country. That history of standing for Country sits quietly behind his practice. His paintings return again and again to the land and to the ancestral journeys that cross it. The repeating circles here suggest sites and the paths between them, a map of belonging rather than geography.

The title points to the mood. This is a work about continuance. About the generations that gather, move on, and return. Jungala passed on his techniques to his daughters Sarrita and Tarisse King, who carry his hand into their own celebrated practice. You can see the beginnings of that lineage in the discipline of the dotwork here, and in the warmth of the colour choices.

Hung on a wall, the painting hums. The pattern never quite settles. It keeps your eye moving across the surface, finding new centres, new connections. A generous and meditative piece from an artist whose influence still ripples outward.