Sarrita King | 'Ngurra, 2026' | 60x147cm

Code: DDSK26102

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Ngurra

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 60x147cm

Year: 2026

Ngurra means home, or Country. Sarrita King paints it here as a living surface, scored and etched with the memory of everything that has moved across it. Fine incised lines fan out from quiet centres, spiralling like growth rings or the eye of a storm. Pale gold veins fracture the olive ground. They read as lightning. They also read as the cracked skin of earth after the dry.

King grew up in Darwin, watching tropical storms split the sky over Larrakia Country. That immersion in weather and land sits at the heart of her practice. She works in the lineage of her father, the late William King Jungala, blending inherited mark making with her own invented methods. The results feel aerial, as if you are looking down on Country from a great height.

The concentric centres here echo waterholes, those gathering places where people met, drank, rested. Around them the land ripples outward in patterned current. The gold cracks tie the composition together like veins of light. You can read them as water finding its path, or fire moving across grass, or the sudden white of lightning on a wet season night.

This is what King calls the language of the earth. Every ripple, burn, and fissure is the land speaking. Her job, as she describes it, is to translate. Ngurra gathers many of her enduring interests in one surface. Storm and stillness. Rock and water. The ancestral grooves worn into Country over tens of thousands of years, and the quiet pulse of it still happening now.