Jack Ball

Jack Ball (b.1986 Sydney) works with photography, collage and casting to create large scale sculptural installations that explore the pleasures of flexi and fluid materiality and desire. Their work draws connections between geological, socio-historical, and bodily archives. Photographed studio constructions are entangled with moments of everyday life. Using techniques of layering, printing and re-photographing, their compositions contain visible seams, cut lines and distortions. More recently Ball has engaged with community archives to explore trans histories through abstraction and sensory connections.

Ball’s solo exhibitions include Heavy Grit at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2024). Wind Chill at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (2021) and Tight Crop at Sydenham International, Sydney (2023). Their work has been shown in the group exhibitions Built Photography at the Museum of Australian Photography (2024), Love in Bright Landscapes, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2021), the pleasurable, the illegible, the multiple, the mundane, Artspace, Sydney (2021), Here&Now17: New Photography, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth (2017), New Matter: Recent forms of Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2016), Dusk to Dark, Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane (2014), and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013). Their work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, University of Western Australia, City of Perth and Artbank. Ball is represented by sweet pea, Boorloo/Perth.