‘Restless, kinetic’: Australia’s trans histories inspire Ramsay Art Prize-winning work
Sydney-based artist Jack Ball has been named the winner of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for his work, Heavy Grit.
Australia’s richest prize for young artists has been awarded to a large-scale mixed media installation partly inspired by historic press coverage of trans and queer lives from the 1950s to the 1970s.
To create Heavy Grit Jack Ball explored scrapbooks of old press clippings held by the Australian Queer Archives, a volunteer-run organisation based in Melbourne which has collected and preserved the material history of Australia’s LGBTIQ+ communities since 1978.
The resulting work is billed as an exploration of intimacy and desire in the past and the present, crafted from an eclectic array of materials from photography and stained glass to beeswax.
The Art Gallery of South Australia received over 500 entries for the fifth outing of its biennial prize, which is open to artists of any medium under the age of 40.
Ball leads a shortlist of 22 artists whose combined entries present a broad survey of Australian contemporary art, from the giant dancing teddy bear of South Korean-born EJ Son, to You’ve been on my mind, sister, a set of skirted stoneware figures by Arrernte artist Alfred Lowe, to a video work inspired by Homer and the war in Ukraine by Stanislava Pinchuk.
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Ball’s win, announced at the Art Gallery this morning, is the first time in three years that the prize has gone to an artist based outside South Australia, following Ida Sophia, Kate Bohunnis and Vincent Namatjira’s wins in 2019, 2021, and 2023.
Born in Perth and based in Sydney, Ball has previously exhibited work at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Art Gallery of South Australia, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, which originally commissioned and exhibited Heavy Grit last year with support from Creative Australia.
“I was looking at a collection of scrapbooks that had references to trans experiences from 1950s and 70s,” Ball told InReview. “They were just such a beautiful, meaningful, complex set of content to process.”
Ball said the final installation, with its contrasting black-and-white imagery and warm orange palette, reflected a “bodily” response to the material.
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“I worked with different methods, like working with abstraction, and just being drawn to the sensory and material connections in this collection, and they sort of found their way through various collage, iterative processes into the work.”
This year’s prize was judged by a panel including Art Gallery of South Australia deputy director Emma Fey, artist Michael Zavros, and Queensland College of Art and Design associate professor Julie Fragar — the People’s Choice winner at the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize, who also won the Archibald Prize earlier this month.
The trio were unanimous in naming Ball this year’s winner.
“Jack Ball’s Heavy Grit impressed us with its experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve,” the judges said. “The work evokes a sensual response to the substance and aesthetics of the Australian Queer Archives to which the work refers, while proposing new possibilities for how we understand those archives in relation to contemporary culture and experience.
“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.”
From Saturday Heavy Grit will be featured in a free exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia alongside the other 22 shortlisted works, before becoming a permanent addition to the gallery’s collection. A $15,000 People’s Choice Prize will also be announced on August 15.
The Ramsay Art Prize 2025 exhibition runs from May 31 to August 31