Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2025' | 20x60cm

Code: DDSK25343

Artist: Sarrita King

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Title: Ngurra

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 20x60cm

Year: 2025

Ngurra, meaning home, camp, Country, is Sarrita King's enduring conversation with the land that shaped her. Across this elongated canvas, fine concentric rings pulse outward like tree rings, like ripples in a waterhole, like the slow breath of the earth itself. They are anchored at either end of the work, drawing the eye through a vast topography of cracked, branching lines that travel the length of the surface in luminous turquoise against a deep midnight ground.

King grew up immersed in the dramatic weather and primal landscapes of the tropical north, and her practice has long been an act of translation, what she calls the language of the earth. Here, that language reads as something between an aerial map and a thunderclap. The radiating circles suggest gathering places, the still centres around which life orbits. The fractured veins between them recall lightning splintering across the Darwin sky, the cracked clay of a dry season floodplain, the branching root systems beneath our feet. These are the patterns King has spent her career attuning herself to: marks that look like weather, like geology, like memory.

The restraint of the palette, two voices only, deep blue and electric cyan, gives the work the quiet authority of night. Fine parallel hatching pulls across the surface like rain seen sideways, or wind moving over water. There is a sense of standing at the edge of a storm, or above Country at dusk, watching the bones of the land glow with their own faint current.

As the daughter of the late William King Jungala and the younger sister of Tarisse King, Sarrita carries a powerful artistic inheritance, blending traditional dotting with the unorthodox techniques her father passed on. Ngurra is the next generation listening and answering, in a language older than any of us.