Available at Kate Owen Gallery | www.kateowengallery.com

Code: ASGS-TKSK-20004

Artist: Tarisse King & Sarrita King

Title: Many Stories I

Medium: Sculpture, Metal, Patina, Black & Silver

Size: 58x48x12cm

Year: 2020

With this sculpture Tarisse & Sarrita wanted to translate some of their favourite stories into a 3D object. The choice to use metal is a reflection on the strength and longevity of the Australian Indigenous culture and the stories passed down over the centuries. The natural tarnish is a reflection of the age of the markings and long history of these stories.

Tarisse King | My Country

Driven to map the country around Katherine, where her ancestors once walked, Tarisse depicts land formations such as rivers, rock holes, billabongs, shelters, tracks and food sources.  In this series, Tarisse visually explores the way her ancestors interacted and lived with the environment. 

Tarisse composes traditional Aboriginal iconography in sharp white lines, circles, arcs and dots often upon a single colour canvas to create a bold aesthetic that has a foot in the contemporary art aesthetic and the traditional.  Song lines that ancestors once walked run across the canvas in different directions, the spaces created by this are filled with concentric circles representing different family clans or ‘life forces’, symbols for food and shelter.  Well balanced, the canvas has a graphic look and a contemporary feel, indicative of Tarisse’s ability to make the ancient appear new.

Tarisse King | Earth Images

Common to Aboriginal practice, Tarisse was handed down the Earth Images style to paint by her father, William King Jangala.  It is a macro view of land around the small remote town of Katherine, the area where her Gurindji tribe once inhabited.  It details meandering rivers, small tributaries, active and abandoned campsites.

The impact of strong colour is immediate in these artworks and the canvas is starkly broken by the dominant and contrasting lines mapping waterways cutting their way through the land.  By concentrating her background dots or placing them sparingly Tarisse manages to create a 3-D effect of landscape, as if one was seeing all the undulations from a bird’s eye view. 

Sarrita King | Language of the Earth

This is the earth’s story. It is also the story of black and white upon the land and the history we have created and carved into it by our interactions with one another. The intersections of black and white culture and how they meet, creating a narrative in the land and in history, and then moving on in their individual and collaborative journeys are abstractly depicted. These paintings thematically diverge from Sarrita’s elemental inspired series. In an abstract way Sarrita references the iconography of the Tingari creation ancestors with her use of strong rectangles. These are then given body with dots and dashes, similar to Morse code. These symbols of communication are haunting in their familiarity, like an ancient language that was once known but now sits dormant at the back of one’s memory. The overall aesthetic is bold and assertive, and just like much iconography in Aboriginal cultures, the ancient now appears contemporary.

Sarrita King | Our Land

This is the earth’s story. It is also the story of the history we have created and carved into it by our interactions with one another. The intersections of black and white culture and how they meet, creating a narrative in the land and in history, and then moving on in their individual and collaborative journeys are abstractly depicted. In an abstract way Sarrita references the iconography of the Tingari creation ancestors with her use of strong rectangles. These are then given body with dots and dashes, similar to Morse code. These symbols of communication are haunting in their familiarity, like an ancient language that was once known but now sits dormant at the back of one’s memory. The overall aesthetic is bold and assertive, and just like much iconography in Aboriginal cultures, the ancient now appears contemporary.

Sarrita King | Waterholes

Sarrita paints the naturally occurring waterholes she remembers travelling around Alice Springs and Katherine. The scarcity of drinking water in certain regions means specific knowledge of where these waterholes are located, as well as their preservation methods, is paramount to survival. Today, Aborigines speak of where waterholes once were as many of them have dried up due to drought or diminished maintenance. When Sarrita traveled to see the waterholes with her father she saw many of them dried up and this is what she paints. Represented by the concentric circles, the waterholes are fed by underground streams pushing through land and rock. Sarrita shows these streams by ribbons of wavy lines intricately entwined across the canvas as muddy and dried ochre colours, just as she experienced them.

Shipping Calculated at Checkout