Saint Cloche presents The Birds Who Drank the Sun, Joshua Searle’s next solo exhibition and the gallery’s first exhibition of 2026. Continuing his exploration of memory, inheritance and cultural reclamation, Searle brings together painting and sculpture to reflect on colonial histories and the endurance of the sacred within Colombian culture.

The exhibition draws inspiration from a colonial tapestry housed in Bogotá’s Museo Arqueológico, where birds rendered through Spanish eyes appear as symbols of consumption and erasure. Imagined as drinking the sun, these birds allude to the theft of Colombia’s gold, once understood by Indigenous peoples as the sweat of the gods, or the sun itself.

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, offering an alternative encounter with the sacred grounded in balance and reciprocity rather than possession.

“In Tasting the Divine, I shift from extraction to abundance,” Searle says. “Watching toucans eat papaya in Colombia, there was no sense of ownership or excess, only balance. The sacred isn’t something to be possessed, but something experienced through coexistence with nature, where nourishment, care and belonging are shared.”

Extending these ideas into three dimensions, the exhibition 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 material presence of gold and its spiritual resonance within Indigenous cosmologies, where gold symbolises balance and divine connection. 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, resistance and resilience into cultural memory.

Through these layered works, The Birds Who Drank the Sun 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.

“The Birds Who Drank the Sun came from thinking about how gold was taken from Colombia and how that story has been shaped through colonial images. Gold was never just a material. For Indigenous cultures it was the sun, the sweat of the gods, a living presence. The birds may appear to consume it, but they cannot take what is sacred. That power remains in the land, in language and in the people.”