Petra Rodgers, Summer Portraits and Joshua Searle, Manos y Cuentas

Alta Forma is delighted to present its sixth duo exhibition bringing together the work of two painting-based artists with strong connections to distinct histories of craft practice. Petra Rodgers, Summer Portraits and Joshua Searle, Manos y Cuentas present two distinct approaches to creating artworks that consider the making of objects, object histories and how they hold and carry memory.  

Summer Portraits follows Petra’s familiar practice of drawing objects, such as shoes, knitwear and textiles in pencil on board. These drawings are whimsical portraits conjuring a specific time and place. Together the series highlights objects, from sandals to wetsuits, that are evocative of summer.  Petra infuses these works with feelings and memories. Objects and things are both lived with, and lively, though her recordings of them.

Joshua’s Manos y Cuentas (Hands and Beads) draws on Colombia’s centuries-old beading traditions. His new body of work features intimate works composed from painted linen, beads, charms and found materials sit alongside a monumental hand-built ceramic necklace, bringing together fragments of personal history with references to Indigenous making traditions. This series consider how objects carry memory across generations. Rather than seeking to faithfully reproduce these histories, the exhibition explores the space between inheritance and interpretation, where admiration, distance, and material transformation shape new ways of understanding culture and belonging.

About the artists:

About Petra Rogers’ artwork:

Petra’s art is inspired by Outsider artist practices, folk-art traditions and her ongoing collection of vintage books and catalogues, old photographs, folk music and textiles. She is particularly interested in the form of the catalogue, her own collection features catalogues of Birds, musical instruments, knitwear, furniture, and antiques. This collecting obsession informs her own work on timber. During the pandemic she experimented with using colour pencil on wood partly inspired by a Aldolf Wolfli drawing that he made on a wooden wardrobe. Now using pencil on board she records things, including sweaters, sweater vests, vases, watches, and shoes creating an expanding catalogue of objects.

Petra is an Australian artist living in Ballarat, Victoria. Petra completed a Bachelor of Fine Art, Painting with Honours (First Class) at RMIT University, Melbourne in 2002 and a Diploma of Visual art (dual award recipient) at RMIT TAFE, Melbourne in 1999. Petra has practiced as an artist for 25 years, she has exhibited extensively in Melbourne, across Victoria, Australia and the United States. Petra has exhibited at major institutions, commercial galleries and artist run spaces including the Art Gallery of Ballarat; the Garden Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney; Linden New Art, Melbourne; McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin; MEPAINTSME, Stockroom, Kyneton; Easy Mark, Melbourne; West Space, Melbourne and Seventh Gallery, Melbourne.

About Joshua Searle’s practice:

Joshua Searle’s 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.

About Joshua Searle:

Joshua Searle is an Australian–Colombian artist working across painting and sculpture. 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.

Artwork details: Petra Rodgers, Umbrella with S, 25 x 30cm, pencil on board and Joshua Searle, Manos y Cuentas (Hands and Beads), oil stick, synthetic polymer paint, glass beds and charms on linen, 2026. Images courtesy of the artists.

Exhibition dates: 8 - 29 August, 2026
Opening celebration 2-4pm Sat 8 August

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