Sarrita King | 'Rain, 2005' | 89x120cm

Code: DDSK05003

Artist: Sarrita King

Title: Rain

Area: Darwin, NT

Community: Gurindji / Waanyi

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 89x120cm

Year: 2005

Sarrita King's Earth Elements works follow the waters of the Northern Territory, the freshwater pools, rivers and soakages that fill and empty with the turn of the seasons, and the sudden intensity of rain when the wet arrives. Rain belongs to this language of water. It is built from the same patient layering of dots and dashes King calls the language of the earth, a code once spoken across Country and now carried forward in paint. The work follows water as it gathers, travels and reshapes the ground it moves through.

Sarrita King is a proud Gurindji Waanyi woman, born in Adelaide in 1988. She is the younger sister of Tarisse King and daughter of the late William King Jungala, whose Gurindji people led the famous Wave Hill Walk-Off — Australia's first successful land rights claim. Growing up in Darwin, Sarrita was immersed in the extreme weather and primal landscapes of the tropical north, which became the foundation of her art. She began painting at 16 and combines traditional Aboriginal dotting techniques with unorthodox methods inherited from her father, creating works of extraordinary depth capturing lightning storms, fire, sand dunes, and the textures of the earth from aerial perspectives. Her art is a fusion of past and present — the next generation keeping ancestral narrative alive.