William King Jungala | 'Earth Images, 2007' | 90x120cm

Code: DDWK07132

Artist: William King Jungala

Title: Earth Images

Area: Darwin / Katherine, NT

Community: Gurindji

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 90x120cm

Year: 2007

William King Jungala painted Country as a living surface. Here the earth burns in deep crimson and oxide red, worked in dense fields of dots that pulse like heat haze over the ground. Yellow channels branch across the canvas. They read as watercourses after rain, or as the veins of fire moving through dry grass, depending on how long you look.

Two concentric circles anchor the composition. One sits near the top left, the other near the bottom right. In the visual language of the desert these mark places, meeting points, sites where something happens. The branching yellow lines travel between them. The eye follows the flow and finds its way across the country.

Jungala was a Gurindji man whose people led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the stand that opened the way for Indigenous land rights in Australia. That attachment to country runs through his work. He painted the land as something felt from the inside, with its weather and its water and its memory all present at once.

His dotting technique is loose and energetic. The reds are layered so the ground never sits flat. You can see the method his daughters Sarrita and Tarisse King would carry forward, the same confidence with large fields of colour and the same reading of landscape as a living thing. Earth images comes from the final year of his life. It stands as a strong example of the vision he passed on.