Joshua Searle

Art has enabled Searle to explore his Colombian heritage and identity which has brought an understanding of the strength that his culture can provide. Searle’s work uses figurative repetition to explore meaning, which shift with the context of each work. Major projects include Wall of Gold 2023, Stolen Gold 2023-2024 and Museo del Oro Robado (Museum of Stolen Gold), 2024. Exhibited in both public and commercial gallery spaces, these projects examine and unpack Pre-Columbian artefacts held in museum collections encountered through texts, as a means to further understand his own diasporic history and identity as an Australian-Colombian.

From an initial examination of collective cultural identity and societal impact to a more individual personal exploration, Searle’s work explores practices of institutional collecting and impacts of colonisation. He continues to undertake a process of reclamation of his own identity as part of the colonial diaspora, and of the works he references. These projects function as a critique of institutionalised practices of theft. For the artist ‘stolen gold’ refers to both the literal and metaphoric gold taken by colonisation.

Searle has undertaken several commissions with the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery 2022-23, including for the Archibald Prize Exhibition 2023. In 2023 he was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize, AGNSW and in 2024 a finalist in the National Works on Paper Prize, MPRG. He has held a number of large-scale solo exhibitions in Melbourne, the most recent being ‘Relentless Optimism’, 2024, North Gallery. Searle is the current recipient of the 2024 Mason Family Trust Fellowship, undertaking a research trip to Colombia to examine Indigenous goldsmithing and sculptural practice housed in museum collections.