Sydney-based artist wins $100,000 prize with work drawing on Queer Archives

Sydney-based artist Jack Ball has won the lucrative Ramsay Art Prize with a work made from collage photographs assembled with rope, wax sculptures, stained-glass, copper pipe and sprinkled with charcoal and garden dirt.

Ball’s installation Heavy Grit was selected from 22 finalists and more than 500 entries, a record for the $100,000 art prize which offers the same cash pool as the long-running Archibald Prize for portraiture.

The winning abstract work is part photography, part soft-form sculpture, and was inspired from a collection of scrapbooks held in the Australian Queer Archives in Melbourne. The journals contain newspaper clippings referencing transgender lives between the 1950s and 1970s.

Jack Ball with his prize-winning work Heavy Grit.Credit: Saul Steed

Judges were impressed with the work’s “restless, kinetic quality” and its “experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve”.

The $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize is one of the nation’s richest for young Australian contemporary artists aged under 40 years for a single work they have completed in the last 12 months. It is awarded every two years to diverse works of any medium.

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. The work first appeared as a centrepiece of their solo show at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in late 2024.

Ball doesn’t literally show the pages but mixes the shapes and page edges from the journals and newspaper clippings with other more personal images to create what the gallery describes as “a vivid interplay between the past and the present”.

Ball has previously said the slippery meaning of the abstract work compares with their own personal experience of gender identity.

This year’s $100,000 Archibald Prize winner, Julie Fragar, served as a judge in her capacity as Associate Professor and Program Director of Visual Art at the Queensland College of Art and Design. She was also the inaugural winner of the Ramsay’s People’s Choice Prize.

Art Gallery of South Australia director Jason Smith said Heavy Grit was selected from more than 500 entries, a record number for the acquisitive prize established in 2017.

“Heavy Grit by Jack Ball captures perfectly what the Ramsay Art Prize aims to offer artists – a platform to present their most ambitious work, unrestrained in scale and medium,” Smith said.

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