Jack Ball wins 2025 Ramsay Art Prize with installation ‘unrestrained in scale and medium’
The expansive installation by Jack Ball incorporates photography, paint and beeswax and was praised by the prize’s judges for its ‘restless, kinetic quality that refuses definition’.
Sydney artist Jack Ball has been announced as winner of the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize, taking home the $100,000 award with a photographic and sculptural installation titled Heavy Grit.
Awarded by Adelaide’s Art Gallery of South Australia, the biannual prize is awarded to a contemporary Australian artist under the age of 40.
The 2025 panel includes Archibald Prize winner and former winner of Ramsay’s people’s choice, Julie Fragar, and AGSA deputy director Emma Fey.
AGSA director Jason Smith said Ball’s installation “perfectly captures what the Ramsay Art Prize aims to offer artists – a platform to present their most ambitious work, unrestrained in scale and medium”.
The Perth-born, Sydney-based artist said they were “still struggling to process [the win], but it is absolutely incredible”.
“I’ve just got so many big feelings about it and I’m feeling very grateful,” Ball said.
The expansive work was created by Ball in response to newspaper clippings from the 1950s and 1970s that referenced a history of transgender Australians. The installation itself incorporates archival materials layered with the artist’s photography and sculptural works.
Collage and a range of materials were used by the artist “as a different way to iterate and transform and remake images over and over, like photographing them or building them as structures on the wall,” they said.
Ball said they were influenced to include beeswax in the work as the material is transformative, it “can be re-melted, it can be reconfigured, I can build something strong from it”.
Fragar said judges were drawn to the work out of more than 500 entries, as “there’s a very playful but also rigorous exploration of materials around the themes of the archive”.
Judges praised Heavy Grit for its experimental nature and sophistication, Fragar singling out “the installation’s restless, kinetic quality that refuses definition”.
Ball has exhibited work at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art and Victoria’s Museum of Australian Photography.
The prize is acquisitive, with Heavy Grit becoming part of AGSA’s permanent collection. The multifarious and immersive installation incorporates inkjet prints, stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, fabric, paint, sand and rope in its construction.
A significant accelerant to an artistic career, 2019 winner Vincent Namatjira has since taken out the Archibald and shown a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.
Fragar said the prize itself is unique in Australia as “it’s one of the highest paying prizes, which is incredible, but it doesn’t set parameters”.
“The Ramsay follows artists where they go,” she said. “It’s certainly cementing itself as one of the most prestigious prizes in the country.”
Of the acquisitive prize, Ball said having “such a large work collected by AGSA feels really significant”, and they are excited to plan what will come next.
“The possibilities that this sort of $100,000 prize opens up are so expansive.”
The people’s choice prize awarded by public vote will be announced August 15, with the exhibition showing until August 31.
Add your comment to this story
M.A.S.H star Loretta Swit dies aged 87
Loretta Swit won two Emmy Awards for playing Major Margaret Houlihan, the demanding head nurse of a behind-the-lines surgical unit during the Korean War on the hit TV series.
Her boss era: Taylor Swift buys back her music
The deal with Shamrock gives the singer-songwriter control over ‘all of the music I’ve ever made’.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout