Just In: Jack Ball Wins the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize, a $100,000 Prize for Young Artists

This morning, at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), 39-year-old artist Jack Ball was announced as the winner of the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize.

Ball (who uses they/them pronouns) is a trans man who was born in Perth, but now lives and works in Sydney. The winning piece, Heavy Grit, was originally part of a solo show Ball exhibited at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2024.

The large-scale piece takes up half a room within the gallery, with pieces dotted across the floor, suspended from the ceiling and hung at varying heights across the wall. It gives the work a fluid feeling and allows viewers to approach from any angle.

Ball’s piece is truly multi-media – made with inkjet prints, stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric, paint, sand and rope. The work is, in essence, a collage. It was inspired by a collection of scrapbooks Ball found at the Australian Queer Archives, which includes press clippings from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s referencing the trans experience.

The transformative nature of mixed-media collage – taking things apart to reimagine them in a new form and context – echoes Ball’s personal experience as a trans artist.

Speaking to Broadsheet, Ball said “I am drawn to materials that can transform, like beeswax that can be melted down and remade into something else. And the images [have been transformed] as well. I often have a different collage process of photographing and re-photographing, working with an old image that comes in and creating a new layer and iteration of it.”

They hope the work will communicate the experience of queer intimacy and desire. The piece will join the permanent collection at AGSA.

Ball’s win was announced by Nicholas Ross, the chair of the James and Diana Ramsay Foundation. Ball was emotional and overwhelmed by the career-changing win. The $100,000 cash prize is the most generous prize for artists under 40 in Australia.

Ball told Broadsheet the biggest gift the prize will give them is “beautiful time” to think about their next move. “[It’ll give me] just so much opportunity as to what’s possible and even just practical things like getting a big studio and thinking more broadly about being able to travel and being able to afford that.”

Ball joins an acclaimed list of previous winners: Sarah Contos, Vincent Namatjira, Kate Bohunnis and Ida Sophia.

The prize was judged by Australian artist Michael Zavros, Julie Fragar – the 2025 Archibald Prize winner and winner of the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize’s People’s Choice Prize – and Emma Fey, deputy director of AGSA.

The trio of judges had the agonising task of narrowing down almost 600 entries to a clutch of just 22. Fragar said the talent pool was exceptional, but the panel was struck by the resonance of Ball’s work.

Heavy Grit and the works of the other 21 finalists will be exhibited at AGSA until August 31, 2025.

@agsa.adelaide
@jack__ball_