Jack Ball Awarded $65,000 Ramsay Art Prize
146June 10, 2025
Perth, Australia-born, Sydney-based artistJack Ballhas won theRamsay Art Prize. The AUD$100,000 (US$65,000) biennial acquisition award was established by theArt Gallery of South Australia(AGSA), Adelaide, in 2017 and is considered the country’s most prestigious honor for an artist under forty.
Ball’s winning work isHeavy Grit, 2024, a large-scale installation investigating the transgender experience and themes of queer intimacy and desire. Composed of a variety of media, including ink-jet prints, textured stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric, paint, sand, and rope, it was inspired by a collection of scrapbooks held by the Australian Queer Archives in Melbourne. Ball looked to clippings dating from the 1950s and 1970s to explore then-contemporary perceptions of trans people.
The thirty-nine-year-old Ball, a trans man whose age would next year have rendered them ineligible for the laurel, told Australian news outlet ABC Arts that they felt “absolutely incredible” to have won the Ramsay. “I’m struggling to process it,” they said. “I just feel so blown away.” Ball described the experience of researching the work, during which they reviewed material that was transphobic as well as that which was trans-positive, as emotional. “I had so many dilemmas, so many curiosities, so many things to grapple with,” they said. “[Making Heavy Grit] was a way to work through that content, materially and physically, spatially, [even] bodily.”
The prize jury—Julie Fragar, head of visual art at the Queensland College of Art and Design; artist Michael Zavros; and AGSA deputy director Emma Fey—in a statement said that they 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.” Fragar told ABC Arts that she found Ball’s work “really magnetic.”
As part of the award, AGSA will acquire Heavy Grit. It is on view at the museum through August 31, alongside the work of the other twenty-one prize finalists.