Jack Ball wins $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize 2025

The Art Gallery of South Australia has announced Jack Ball as the winner of the prestigious Ramsay Art Prize 2025, awarding the Sydney-based artist $100,000 for their large-scale photographic and sculptural installation Heavy Grit. Ball – who was featured in Art Collector’s recent 50 Things Collectors Should Know issue – now joins a notable list of Ramsay recipients including Vincent Namatjira and Kate Bohunnis.

Selected from a record number of over 500 entries, Heavy Grit is a deeply immersive installation that resists easy categorisation. Developed in response to archival material from the Australian Queer Archives, including press clippings from the 1950s to 1970s that references trans lives, Ball’s work layers found material with personal imagery, beeswax, stained glass, copper pipe, fabric, charcoal, sand and rope. The resulting installation invokes queer intimacy, bodily transformation and the mutability of memory.

The judging panel – artist Michael Zavros, AGSA Deputy Director Emma Fey, and Archibald winner Julie Fragar – were unanimous. “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,” they said.

AGSA Director Jason Smith praised Ball for creating “their most ambitious work, unrestrained in scale and medium,” highlighting how Heavy Grit reflects the very purpose of the prize: to elevate and accelerate contemporary Australian art practices.

Ball’s work will be exhibited at AGSA from 31 May to 31 August 2025 and acquired into the gallery’s collection.

A $15,000 People’s Choice Prize will be announced on 15 August.

For more information visit the AGSA website.