The Art Gallery of South Australia has announced Jack Ball as the winner of the prestigious Ramsay Art Prize 2025, awarding the Sydney-based artist $100,000 for their large-scale photographic and sculptural installation Heavy Grit.
Jack Ball was among 22 finalists selected from more than 500 entries for the $100,000 biennial prize, awarded to a contemporary Australian artist aged under 40.
A Sculptural Installation with Kinetic Quality
Heavy Grit is a deeply immersive installation that resists easy categorisation. Developed in response to archival material from the Australian Queer Archives, including press clippings from the 1950s to 1970s that references trans lives, Ball’s work layers found material with personal imagery, beeswax, stained glass, copper pipe, fabric, charcoal, sand and rope. The resulting installation invokes queer intimacy, bodily transformation and the mutability of memory.
Jack Ball. Heavy Grit. 2025. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo Courtesy: AGSA/Saul Steed
“In the 1950s-60s, seeing different references to trans experiences was incredibly meaningful and complex and I had a lot of big feelings to process through the experience of engaging with that content,” Ball said.
The work includes fragments and glimpses of queer histories, layering archival materials with personal images and soft form sculptures, and creating an interplay between the past and the present. Perth-born Ball pinned and layered printed, irregularly shaped images to the wall, framed them behind amber-stained glass, as well as slung them over suspended ropes and copper pipe anchored by sand-filled purple anchors.
Jack Ball. Heavy Grit. 2025. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo Courtesy: AGSA/Saul Steed
There are also suspended elements, with ropes anchored by purple silk sandbags that have been coiled into intestinal shapes. An earlier iteration of the work, exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2024, even contained chilli powder.
Ball, who worked on Heavy Grit intensively for more than a year, said they had a “huge emotional response” to scrapbooks held by the Australian Queer Archives. “I just had a lot of fun working with these sculptural materials, and thinking about what sort of spatial relationships I can build,” said Ball.
Jack Ball: Life and Exhibitions
Jack Ball grew up in Boorloo, Perth and moved to Gadigal, Sydney two years ago. They held a major solo exhibition at PICA in 2024. In 2021 they had a solo exhibition at AGWA and they have been part of group exhibitions at MCA, AGNSW, AGWA, Artspace, PICA and MAPh. Ball’s practice involves large-scale photographic and sculptural installations that explore themes of queer intimacy and desire using collage – a method of thinking and working that involves undoing and remaking to create new forms.
Jack Ball. Courtesy of the artist
The judging panel – artist Michael Zavros, AGSA Deputy Director Emma Fey, and Archibald winner Julie Fragar – were unanimous. “We were particularly struck by the installation’s restless, kinetic quality that refuses definition and creates an open opportunity to connect individually with the materials, forms and images the work deploys,” they said.
Fragar says that she and the other judges found Ball’s work “really magnetic.” “We had to go with the work that kept staying with us; that insisted on our attention. Jack’s dealing with photography in a really interesting way. I think they’re dealing with trans experience in a really interesting way. And in a material way. There’s such incredible resolution around form, around space.”
The other 22 finalists in this year’s prize include Archibald Prize finalists Clara Adolphs and Jason Phu (also a former Ramsay finalist), and past finalists Emma Buswell, Liam Fleming, Alfred Lowe, Gian Manik, Tom Polo and James Tylor.
AGSA Director Jason Smith praised Ball for creating “their most ambitious work, unrestrained in scale and medium,” highlighting how Heavy Grit reflects the very purpose of the prize: to elevate and accelerate contemporary Australian art practices.
Ball’s work became part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection, joining works by past winners Sarah Contos (2017), Vincent Namatjira (2019), Kate Bohunnis (2021) and Ida Sophia (2023).
Administered by the Art Gallery of South Australia and supported by the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, the Ramsay Art Prize is Australia’s richest prize for contemporary artists under 40. Ball’s work will be exhibited at AGSA from 31 May to 31 August 2025. The Ramsay Art Prize exhibition is open from May 31 to August 31 at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and entry is free.
Image: Jack Ball with Heavy Grit in Ramsay Art Prize 2025, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo Courtesy: AGSA/Saul Steed
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