Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2023' | 90x180cm

Code: DDSK23155

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 90x180cm

Year: 2023

Sarrita King paints the earth as a living document. Ngurra means home, or Country, and here that home glows in warm ochres and pale gold. The surface reads like aerial topography. Concentric whirls mark waterholes or gathering points. Fine white lines fracture across the canvas like the cracked skin of a dry lakebed after the wet season has passed.

This is the kind of work Sarrita has built her practice around. She grew up in the tropical north, watching storms split the sky and the land respond in kind. Her father, a Gurindji man, taught her that the warmth of a fire and the meander of a river belong to the same continuous conversation. She calls it the language of the earth. Her paintings are translations of it.

Look closely at the swirling brushwork beneath the cracking. It moves the way wind moves over sand. The pale centres of each circle pull the eye downward, as if you are standing above a vast plain and watching it breathe. There are no human figures here. The marks themselves carry the human presence, layered into the country the way footprints layer into dust over generations.

Sarrita combines fine dot work with broader, unorthodox techniques passed down from her father. The result has texture you can almost feel under your fingers. Ngurra is quieter than her lightning paintings and warmer than her sand dune studies. It sits in the space where memory and geography meet. A work that rewards slow looking, and one that settles a room with its golden, sunlit calm.