Joshua Searle
Australian/Colombian
b. 1998

Joshua Searle is an Australian–Colombian artist working across painting and sculpture. His practice explores memory, inheritance and cultural reclamation through the transformation of historical objects, family narratives and material traditions. Drawing on his Colombian heritage, Searle revisits pre-Columbian artefacts, museum collections and oral histories to consider how culture is carried across generations despite histories of migration, colonisation and displacement.

Grounded in research, his work transforms historical forms into contemporary visual languages that connect personal experience with broader questions of cultural continuity. Through recurring materials including clay and timber, Searle explores the tension between preservation and transformation, treating making as an act of remembering as much as reinvention.

Searle is the recipient of the 2024 Mason Family Trust Fellowship, which supported research into Indigenous Colombian goldsmithing and ceramic traditions. His work has been presented in major public gallery exhibitions including Bienvenido at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and has been recognised through selection as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize (2023, 2025), the inaugural MAC yapang Art Prize (2025), the Walyalup Fremantle Print Award (2025), and the National Works on Paper Prize (2024). His research continues to inform an evolving practice that reimagines material culture as a living connection between past and present.


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