William King Jungala | 'Earth Cycles, 2007' | 140x230cm

Code: DDWK07101

Artist: William King Jungala

Area: Darwin / Katherine, NT

Community: Gurindji

Title: Earth Cycles

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 140x230cm

Year: 2007

Across this expansive canvas, William King Jungala conjures the living skin of Country — a vast field of densely worked dots that shimmer like weathered stone, sun-bleached earth, or the mineral crust of a dry riverbed seen from above. The surface vibrates with countless tiny marks, each one a quiet pulse in the larger rhythm of the land.

A single sinuous line travels diagonally across the work, cutting through the dotted plain like a fissure in ancient ground. It reads at once as a watercourse threading its way through stone, a crack opening in sun-baked clay, and an ancestral pathway tracing the long memory of Country. This is the central conversation of Earth Cycles: the slow, patient turning of seasons, the rise and fall of waters, the way the land carries the marks of everything that has moved across it.

Jungala was a Gurindji man whose people are remembered for the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the action that became Australia's first successful Indigenous land rights claim. That deep relationship to ground, to belonging, to the act of standing on one's own Country, hums quietly beneath his practice. His paintings are not maps in the literal sense but felt impressions of place: tonal, atmospheric, attentive to the way earth breathes and changes.

The restrained monochrome palette — silvers, charcoals, bone whites, strips the work back to something elemental. Without the distraction of colour, the eye is drawn into texture and rhythm, into the meditative labour of mark-making itself. Completed in the final year of his life, this is a major late work by an artist whose vision now lives on through his daughters Sarrita and Tarisse King, who inherited his techniques and his reverence for Country. Earth Cycles stands as both a landscape and a legacy.