JOSHUA Searle is an emerging Mornington Peninsula-based artist with an increasing national and commercial profile. His work examines socio-cultural issues and his own diasporic identity. Searle has been a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize (AGNSW) (2025, 2023), Fremantle Print Art Award (2025) and a finalist in MPRG’s National Works on Paper (2024).
In 2024, Searle was awarded a Mason Family Trust Fellowship which supported a research trip to his mother’s homeland in Colombia. He explored Indigenous goldsmithing and sculptural practices through museum collections and meeting with archaeologists whilst visiting archaeological sites. There he studied Pre-Columbian artefacts as a means to further understand his own connection to history and identity as an Australian-Colombian.
The exhibition title Bienvenido means ‘welcome’ in Spanish—a greeting that, in this context, evokes a personal arrival, belonging, and return. It captures a significant moment in Searle’s life: his first visit to Colombia, where he met extended family and walked the streets of his ancestral town.
During the Fellowship, Searle met with Eugenio Viola, Artistic Director of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art who worked in Australia a few years back, connected with contemporary art gallerists, and attended ARTBO, South America’s leading contemporary art fair, as well as visiting many museums of contemporary art, and sites of historical and archaeological significance, tracing the history of Columbia over millennia.
Searle worked with Teo Duque, a ceramicist at the Archaeological Museum in Bogotá, who specialised in traditional sculptural practices, creating reproduction objects for museums. Sharing his connection to and knowledge of these practices with Searle, Duque inspired the next stage of Searle’s work.
Back in Australia, Searle collaborated with Melbourne-based artist Brendan Huntley and Stoker Studio in Mornington to produce a new large-scale work El Sudor del Sol (The Sweat of the Sun), a major wall installation inspired by Colombian expressions and techniques he learned from Duque. The title references the indigenous belief in South America that gold was the sweat of sun, also viewed as a god, symbolising balance and divine connection rather than material value. While this history underpins the work, Searle’s focus lies in exploring language and cultural identity, with gold’s symbolism serving as a resonant backdrop.
The Joshua Searle: Bienvenido exhibition is on display at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery through 16 November.
