Joshua Searle’s painting of El chupacabra emerges from his ongoing exploration of memory, inheritance, and the porous boundary between myth and lived experience. Drawing on Latin American folklore, the figure of the Chupacabra becomes less a creature of fear and more a vessel for cultural transmission—an embodiment of stories carried across generations, geographies, and identities.

Joshua Searle
Australian/Colombian
b. 1998

In his practice Joshua Searle continues an exploration of memory, inheritance, and cultural reclamation through painting and sculpture. Working across both public and commercial contexts, Searle examines the diasporic condition—how identity and belonging are shaped by histories of migration, displacement, and colonisation. Drawing on his Colombian heritage, his works often revisit Pre-Columbian artefacts and museum collections, transforming them into contemporary meditations on power, loss, and the endurance of culture.

Recent projects including Museo del Oro Robado (Museum of Stolen Gold) (2024), Oro vivo (Living Gold) (2025), and El sudor del sol (The Sweat of the Sun) (2025) continue his dialogue between colonial histories and living cultural memory. In these works, gold becomes both a material and metaphor—reflecting its spiritual resonance in Indigenous cosmologies, where it symbolises balance and divine connection. Through his sculptural forms and painted surfaces, Searle reimagines how the sacred persists beyond acts of erasure, illuminating what endures through land, language, and the collective body of a people.

Searle has received national recognition through major public gallery exhibitions, including Bienvenido at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 2025, and as a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 & 2025), the inaugural MAC yapang Art Prize (2025), the Walyalup Fremantle Print Prize (2025), and the National Works on Paper Prize (2024). Recipient of the 2024 Mason Family Trust Fellowship, Searle’s research in Colombia—examining Indigenous goldsmithing and sculptural practices—continues to inform his expanding visual language, one that seeks to reclaim, reimagine, and renew cultural continuity across distance and time.