Jack Ball Wins $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize 2025

The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) has announced Jack Ball as the winner of the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize, the nation’s most prestigious and generous visual art prize for Australian artists under 40. Ball will receive $100,000 for their winning work Heavy Grit, a large-scale photographic and sculptural installation that will be exhibited at AGSA from May 31 to August 31, 2025.

AGSA Director Jason Smith praised the winning work, calling Heavy Grit a standout example of the Prize's ambition to showcase unbounded creativity: “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’s work explores queer intimacy and desire, drawing from the Australian Queer Archives, particularly a collection of 1950s–70s press clippings referencing trans lives. Heavy Grit layers archival materials with personal imagery and tactile sculptural elements—using inkjet prints, stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric, paint, sand, and rope—to create a richly textured, immersive installation that challenges the notion of fixed identity or singular historical narratives.

The judging panel—composed of artist Michael Zavros, 2025 Archibald Prize winner Julie Fragar, and AGSA Deputy Director Emma Fey—was unanimous in its decision. “Jack Ball’s Heavy Grit impressed us with its experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve. The work proposes new possibilities for how we understand queer archives in relation to contemporary experience,” the panel said.

The Ramsay Art Prize is supported in perpetuity by the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation and is held biennially by AGSA. It is an acquisitive prize, meaning Ball’s work will become part of the Gallery’s permanent collection. Ball now joins an acclaimed list of past winners: Sarah Contos (2017), Vincent Namatjira (2019), Kate Bohunnis (2021), and Ida Sophia (2023).

Jack Ball grew up in Boorloo (Perth) and currently resides in Gadigal (Sydney). They held a solo show at PICA in 2024, with previous exhibitions at institutions such as AGWA, MCA, AGNSW, Artspace, and MAPh. Ball’s practice combines collage and installation to interrogate memory, body, and transformation.

The 2025 exhibition also features a $15,000 People’s Choice Prize, supported by sponsor LK, to be decided by public vote and announced on August 15, 2025.

Ball will give an artist talk on Saturday, May 31 as part of the exhibition’s public programming. Full details are available at agsa.sa.gov.au.

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