The winner of this year’s $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) is Jack Ball, for their photographic and sculptural installation, Heavy Grit, developed in response to a collection of scrapbooks held by the Australian Queer Archives.
Perth-born and Sydney-based, Ball explores themes of queer intimacy and desire in their work, revealing fragments of queer histories through layering archival material with personal images and soft-form sculptures.
Heavy Grit is an ambitious multi-media work comprising inkjet prints, textured stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric, paint, sand and rope.
AGSA Director Jason Smith says, “From a record number of entries in 2025, Heavy Grit by Jack Ball perfectly captures what the Ramsay Art Prize aims to offer artists – a platform to present their most ambitious work, unrestrained in scale and medium.”
Ball has exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Art Gallery of Western Australia. They held a major solo exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) in 2024.
The Ramsay Art Prize is an acquisitive art prize awarded to Australian artists under 40 with no restrictions in medium or material.
The judges this year were unanimous in their decision. “Jack Ball’s Heavy Grit impressed us with its experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve. 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.”
The judging panel includes Australian artist Michael Zavros; 2025 Archibald Prize winner and recipient of the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize’s People’s Choice Prize, Julie Fragar; and Emma Fey, Deputy Director, AGSA.
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All finalists’ works will be exhibited at AGSA from 31 May to 31 August 2025, with the People’s Choice Prize to be chosen by public vote and announced on 15 August.
Jack Ball will be speaking at AGSA as part of a series of artist talks on 31 May: learn more.
