Jack Ball

Jack Ball (b.1986 Boorloo/Perth) works with photography and collage to create largescale sculptural installations that explore the pleasures of messy materiality and trans intimacy. They often utilise fragmentation and abstraction to play with the boundaries between the inside and outside of bodies. Abstraction offers breathing space to move away from fast signification that dominates a gendered read. Instead, Ball focuses on gritty pixelated textures, saturated colour, tight crops, and fluid and flexi materials. In many ways, Ball's work is a performative personal archive, a collage of fragments from different points in time that responds to the pressures for linearity and resolution. At the same time, they make photos that are decisively figurative and performatively self-aware of a public gaze. Ball’s work hinges on the sweaty tension between these two approaches.

Ball’s solo exhibitions include 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 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). Ball is represented by sweet pea, Boorloo/Perth.