The birds who drank the sun

Joshua Searle
The birds who drank the sun
28 January - 8 February 2026

In The birds who drank the sun, Joshua Searle continues his exploration of memory, inheritance and cultural reclamation through painting and sculpture. The exhibition draws on a colonial tapestry from Bogotá’s Museo Arqueológico, where birds—rendered through Spanish eyes—become symbols of consumption and erasure. These creatures, imagined as drinking the sun, allude to the theft of Colombia’s gold: once understood by Indigenous peoples as the sweat of the gods, or the sun itself. Yet Searle’s birds suggest a deeper truth—that the divine cannot be stolen. It remains embedded in the land, culture and people of Colombia.

Alongside these works, Searle presents Tasting the Divine, a series of paintings depicting toucans eating ripe papaya, inspired by his trek to the Lost City in Santa Marta. Here, the bird becomes a bearer of abundance, embodying another way of encountering the sacred: not through possession, but through coexistence with nature, where balance and belonging reveal divinity in the everyday.

Extending these ideas into three dimensions, Searle debuts El sudor del sol (The sweat of the sun), a major new ceramic work commissioned by Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Its mirrored surface reflects both the materiality of gold and its spiritual resonance in Indigenous cosmologies, where gold symbolises balance and divine connection. Interwoven across the surface, phrases drawn from everyday Colombian expression—todo bien (“all good”), qué rico (“how nice”), querer es poder (“to love is power”), son ladrones (“they are thieves”)—ground the work in living language, weaving intimacy and resilience into cultural memory.

Through these layered works, Searle reimagines how the sacred endures beyond colonial histories: not in what has been taken, but in what continues to live through land, language, and the collective body of a people.

Opening Reception 6-8pm
Wednesday 28th Jan 2026

Saint cloche gallery
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