Trans Artist Jack Ball Wins Top Prize For Powerful Trans History Art Installation
Image: Image: Instagram Art Gallery of South Australia
Trans artist Jack Ball has won the prestigious $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for their immersive and emotionally resonant installation Heavy Grit.
The announcement was made at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), where the exhibition will run until August 31.
Jack Ball: “I’m struggling to process it”
The biennial Ramsay Art Prize is awarded to an Australian artist under 40, and Sydney Artist Jack Ball, aged 39, is only the second winner based outside of South Australia.
Their winning work, a layered fusion of photography, sculpture, and queer history, explores archival narratives from the Australian Queer Archives, focusing particularly on trans experiences from the 1950s to 1970s.
Speaking to ABC Arts, Ball said it feels “absolutely incredible” to win the award.
“I’m struggling to process it. I just feel so blown away,” they said.
During their acceptance speech, they added: “Seeing my work in conversation with so many people I respect is such a beautiful moment.”
Heavy Grit was originally curated by Sarah Wall and debuted at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2024.
The installation incorporates newspaper clippings, beeswax sculptures, sand-filled fabric, and personal photographs, a sensorial landscape exploring identity, intimacy, and history.
“I had such an emotional response to the archival collection I was looking at,” Ball shared.
“I had so many dilemmas, so many curiosities, so many things to grapple with. [Making Heavy Grit] was a way to work through that content, materially and physically, spatially, [even] bodily.”
The judging panel, which included acclaimed artist Julie Fragar, praised Ball’s “experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve.”
Fragar noted, “We had to go with the work that kept staying with us; that insisted on our attention. Jack’s dealing with photography in a really interesting way. I think they’re dealing with trans experience in a really interesting way. And in a material way. There’s such incredible resolution around form, around space.”
Ball hopes to use the prize money to travel and connect with new communities. But most of all, they’re proud to see queer narratives, particularly those of trans people, honoured in a national institution. “I’d be lucky if one image got collected, but to have multiple components collected as a whole is incredibly significant,” they said.
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