Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2025' | 30x60cm

Code: DDSK25241

Artist: Sarrita King

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Title: Ngurra

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 30x60cm

Year: 2025

Ngurra — Country. The word holds everything: the land beneath one's feet, the ancestors who walked it, the stories etched into its surface, and the belonging that flows between a person and place. In this work, Sarrita King offers her translation of that immense concept, rendering Country in warm ochres and apricot light, as though the canvas itself were sun-baked earth seen from far above.

Concentric rings ripple outward across the surface, drawn in patient, fine white linework that gathers and disperses like breath. These radiating forms suggest waterholes, the gathering places that have sustained life across millennia and the topographic contours of land softened by wind and time. Between them, fractured pale veins crack across the composition like dry riverbeds, lightning seen from the heavens, or the fissures that open in clay after the wet retreats. It is a landscape that holds multiple readings at once.

King grew up in Darwin, daughter of the late William King Jungala and a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman whose ancestral Country stretches from Katherine through the desert to Mt Isa. Her practice has long been concerned with what she calls the language of the earth, the idea that every ripple, burn mark, sand formation and crack is the land speaking, and her role is to listen and translate. Ngurra sits squarely in that lineage of looking: an aerial, almost cartographic meditation on how Country reveals itself to those who pay attention.

There is a hum of warmth here, a glow that suggests late afternoon light pooling across a vast plain. The repetition of circular forms feels almost meditative, drawing the eye into and through the surface. What at first appears as pattern slowly resolves into something more intimate — the memory of a place, the echo of an ancestor's footstep, the quiet assertion that this earth is known, named, and loved.