Jack Ball’s artistic practice thrives on the interplay of ambiguity and intimacy, bringing into focus the tension between what is revealed and what remains hidden. For their debut solo exhibition at PICA’s West End Gallery, Heavy Grit, Ball transforms the space into a labyrinth of photographic and sculptural interventions.
The exhibition title hints at a duality—both the coarse physicality of the materials and the layered emotional weight embedded within this new body of work.
Known for their sprawling photographic installations, Ball’s approach is rooted in collage—a process of dismantling and reassembling that reflects the complexities of queer desire and history. By leaning into abstraction, Ball’s work resists tidy narratives, embracing instead the fluid, indeterminate states that characterize much of queer experience. This tension is central to Heavy Grit, where archival fragments collide with personal images and sculptural forms to evoke a sensory interplay of the past and present.
The Australian Queer Archive serves as a source and subject in this project. Photographs of materials drawn from its collection are woven together with images from Ball’s studio and snapshots of daily life. Using techniques such as layering, cutting, and re-photographing, Ball creates compositions that retain the traces of their making—visible seams, scratches, and stains that signal a refusal to obscure process. These marks are not imperfections but rather invitations, opening space for viewers to trace their own connections and interpretations.
At the heart of the exhibition is Ball’s ability to conjure “entangled connections” while leaving room for gaps—pauses in the narrative that demand active engagement. The works don’t dictate; they suggest, layering textures and references that speak as much to the sensory as to the cerebral. It is a method that underscores the fragmentary nature of history, particularly trans and queer histories, where gaps in the archive are often as telling as what is preserved.
Ball’s sculptural interventions further extend this dialogue. Constructed on-site, these works echo the materiality and themes of their photographic counterparts, blurring the line between image and object. Together, these elements transform the gallery into an immersive environment where the viewer navigates overlapping terrains of memory, desire, and speculation.
