PICA Curator Sarah Wall in conversation with exhibiting artist Jack Ball to discuss their exhibition  Heavy grit, which brought together installation and collage, drawing on materials from the Australian Queer Archive and recent images from Ball’s daily life exhibiting at PICA in 2024.  Jack Ball is known for their sprawling photographic installations that explore themes of queer intimacy and desire using collage – a method of thinking and working that involves undoing and remaking to create new forms. Ball draws on the possibilities of abstraction to create works that resist easy reading and instead exalt ambiguous, slippery states.  

[Sarah Wall] Thank you again for being here and congratulations to you, Jack. I thought I would begin this discussion with a short introduction about your work to situate the exhibition.  Jack’s practice engages with the politics and aesthetics of mess and collage as a framework for exploring trends and queer photographic representation. In 2023 they had a solo exhibition called Tight Crop at Sydenham International in Sydney, and in 2021 they had a major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Their next solo exhibition will be at sweet pea gallery here in Perth which will be opening in January. This exhibition Heavy grit has been 12 months in the making.  
I was talking to you earlier about how I’ve been struggling a little with figuring out where to start this discussion exactly and I think it has something to do with the way your work is enmeshed with so many different things at once and the way that you’re constantly shifting and playing with the forms and textures of the image and what that might take, and you extend your practice to encompass sculpture as well.  You developed much of this work in your studio at Artspace in Sydney. Can you talk about how you approached making work for this gallery space and the interplay between what happens in your studio in Sydney and on your computer screen and what’s possible there? And at what point you feel, ok now this needs to happen, or do I need to see this in a physical space? 

[Jack Ball]  One component was the sculptural element of the show which was something I really wanted to develop further and push through this opportunity. That was a key part of what I was working out in the physical studio space, trying to understand materially what was happening with my images. What can I do with them? How could I work with the paper? I started developing some casting, working with beeswax and did a lot of development work and planning around what that could look like and how that could work and I started working on the layout for the show about six months ago. The layout itself is very much embedded in the process and it’s just a constant process of shifting, tweaking, changing and each image is developed for its pair or what’s around it. Everything was fairly meticulously planned out. But then coming into the space of course you can feel your body in relation to the work and I think that was a really important shift for me. This is when I understood, ok, this is the physical scale, even if I’m mapping out the scale in the studio.  I had placed them a lot higher on the wall in my Photoshop layout and just actually standing in front of them and feeling them, really worked out where they needed to be in relation to our bodies. 

[SW] I think this movement relates a little to your methodology as well, and particularly the idea of slippery grammar, which is also the title of these black and white works that you see on the wall here. Can you speak to that? 

[JB]  I’m dyslexic and I’ve got ADHD and over the last few years, I’ve been really leaning into it and enjoying it, embracing it and seeing the threads between having dyslexia and my image making methodology, they’re so interwoven. I have this complicated relationship with texts where things move, they shape-shift, even just typing a word into word doc, it’s like waiting for spell check to catch up, which iterations are going to land.  I think these things are linked to how images move around and how they change and rotate. Everything’s up for questioning. I think also the threads of connection are really key in the show. There’s repetition across the room. There’s so many different ways to link the images, and I feel like I’m just really embracing all of those things, it feels like a mind map. I spend a lot of my life trying to just have a singular thread when I talk, when I tell the story, when I’m trying to not jump off in different associations, just trying to stay focused, communicate clearly and then this is the way for me to really just expand and open out and have room around that. 

[SW] It’s interesting talking about the movement that is constant and the constant rearrangement and bringing things together, then everything falls apart and you start again. This is the question I asked you during the development of the exhibition, but at what point do you go, OK, this is this it, I stop now? 

[JB] I didn’t really know how to answer you when you asked that because I was working on the layout right till very close to the end and I shot another roll of colour film and added four new images into that wall over there and it all fell apart, it just looked horrible, something just changed and it wasn’t holding its structure anymore, and that’s when I realised that’s a new body of work.

[SW] In a way, this exhibition marks a departure from some of your recent work where you’ve largely drawn on your own personal archive of images. In this exhibition, you’re looking to other kinds of archives, public archives, including the Australian Queer Archives, which is in Melbourne. Can you tell us about this shift? What prompted your interest in public archives and where has that led you, particularly in relation to this exhibition? 

[JB] I think a few years ago I started casually looking at archives and what was collected and what queer histories could I find. A lot of the knowledge I had about queer histories were from the UK or America. I was curious to see what the collections around me held and what had been saved. And so slowly I’ve been trying to understand as an artist, how I can relate to this content, what’s there? I quickly realised that I wasn’t there as an archivist or historian. It was very much like a material engagement with the archives and I think that related a lot to the fact that it was quite difficult to find any references to transmasculine lives. But they are there – we’re everywhere; it’s just trying to look at the glimpses and the fragments and the materials of the archives themselves. When I was at the Queer Archives, I found a lot of really amazing community created content that were so emotional and beautiful and moving. I really connected with them deeply. I think around the early 90s there would be a gap where the picture was going to be inserted on the front page or throughout the newsletter or you could see the cut lines where the image was stuck on before it was photocopied, like really simple as things but in this context, it just felt so evocative, so I started working with the gaps and the cut lines, which is what’s in these works, along this wall, particularly, everything’s hand cut. It’s wonky. It’s referencing the shapes of the pages and down the end, specifically, it’s referencing a lot of the book images on that wall are of a scrapbook collection that someone had collected from 1950s to I think around the 2000s of any reference to trans experiences that were in newspapers, and a lot of the content was really difficult to engage with. It was really connected to this way of collecting and saving and caring for these fragments and glimpses into like trans life. The shapes are from the 1950s and 1960s in Australian newspapers. Working with the shapes and the forms and the materials was a way for me to engage with them. 

[SW] Has it influenced your colour choices in this exhibition as well? 

[JB] Yeah, I think the material aesthetic decisions. I worked with 35mm film for these black and white ones. 

[SW] Maybe now we can speak a little to the title Heavy grit. Often it can be tricky when you’re making a new body of work for a gallery because they ask for the title before you’ve actually had a chance to make the work and for you the title follows the work, once you’ve made the work, or you’re close to finishing it and you know what it is, that’s when the title comes. I’m wondering if you can speak to Heavy grit and what these two terms hold for you and their significance I guess in relation to these works. 

[JB] It was a really heavy textual feeling of erosion, of exploitation, of textual grain. There’s a real sandy feeling and that was coming from just being led by feelings to work through this textual experience. And like you said, it came late. But that’s like my sexy relationship with language. Heavy there’s a weight. The sandbags. I know the wax sculptures aren’t necessarily heavy, but they’ve got a rock, like geological body feeling. I think some of them, at least for me, holding paper, pinching it in place. Ripping it like pushing it down. That was the set of feelings that I was working with. 

[SW] Are feelings or sensations often a place that you create work from or do you think is quite particular to this body of work? 

[JB] I think it’s really new for me, I think this work feels like I’ve been engaging with communities that I’m part of and the histories of those communities, this feels a little bit less introspective. But there’s still all these, drives for the feelings. It’s really led by that rather than everyday images.  

[SW] I think another shift that I see is that this work is perhaps less figurative, some of your earlier work had lots of bodies in it, including your own body, here there is a sense of the body, but it comes through in different ways. Can you speak to that? 

[JB] I’ve been interested in thinking of abstraction in loose ways and along with a lot of other artists, queer artists and trans artists, thinking of abstraction as a way to explore the inside and outside of bodies without that fixation on surface and on exteriority. There’s a lot of room to play and breathe. It’s the expansiveness that it can allow. So there’s that thread that’s been coming through, and then I think getting back to the bodily thing, I wanted to try and push myself with what colours I work with that had a bodily feeling through something like a largescale colour work. Does that make sense? 

[SW] And there’s other references to, I guess internal processes in the copper piping and fluids and circulation, those things as well. Maybe it would be nice to hear you talk about transformation or I guess the importance of at least transformative processes in your material choices in this exhibition, we see sand and wax and also glass. Can you speak to some of those materials? 

[JB] I got so much joy working with hot material for the first time, like the heat, the intensity of the wax, I know the colours are quite stewed, I dyed them with chili powder and activated charcoal and spirulina health food products. I think there’s heat and intensity in that orange that I really wanted. It was just so fascinating – it’s a simple material, beeswax, but just watching all the different stages of how it cools down, monitoring its temperature, embracing the wrinkles and throughout it all, the different things I could do with the heating and cooling process, were so enjoyable. 

[SW] And where do their forms come from? 

[JB] There’s a few different threads of limbs and things that hug or wrap around something and they are like muscle fibres. Some of them are more geological in their structure. They’re all hands. It was very much about drawing in clay and drawing in sand. Drawing things and other threads. 

[SW] I’d like to ask you about the links between your sculptural and photographic process. Not just in relation to this exhibition, but more broadly we were talking yesterday about how in 2013, some work you made for Primavera you used plaster, cardboard and other materials. So has photography and sculpture always been interwoven in terms of your thinking or making. Can you speak to the relationship between the two? 

[JB] Like you said, I was making these haphazard moulds out of cardboard. They would always break, spill open and the plaster would go everywhere. But I would reform it and push it back or cut it back. It was always about how I photographed them to use all those photo methods and dramatic lighting to create illusion or rather to amplify and distort what was there.  
This time it’s really exciting to be working with the actual objects itself. The old castles I was making, they’re pretty average looking, it was really about how I photographed them to make them something more dramatic or more curious. But I’m really enjoying working with them, the space for what they are, quite simple casts. But like I like what I can do with them. Hopefully doing something more. More functional.  

[SW] With these sculptures, it almost feels like I have a sense of relinquishing control as well. We talked earlier about the works on the wall being very precisely mapped and your sculptures, you have an idea of what you want to do. But then things change once you get in the space and you just have to step back and say this is what it is and it’s going to keep changing as well, particularly with the wax. And you’re speaking about your finger marks being left on the sculptures and the oils and things and the change of colours. So you have less control over those, maybe. 

[JB] Yeah, which is a really new experience to not quite understand, or to be understanding it as I’m going, which is exciting.  

[SW] I have another colour question and it relates to the title of these small works here behind the textured orange glass. Can you speak to the use of orange or absorbing blue, which is the title of these works? 

[JB] I have a bunch of filters that I picked up along the way ages ago and they just stayed in my studio. It’s like a beautiful cyan and a hot orange that are used for tungsten or daylight balance in film photography. The orange filter absorbs blue and vice versa. So there was that thread that thinking of distortion and warping colours. And then there was realising this reminds me of retro shower glass. So there’s a little bit of I feel like there’s a little bit more ‘gaze’ conversation around it, like how you’re looking. I think it was one of those threads that came up in the archives a lot of, “What does it mean for me to be looking at this?” This is how I’m relating to it and then, the retro shower glasses, creates a desiring feeling with how it’s distorting the content.  

[SW] I’m going to ask you one last question, Jack. I wanted to ask you what gives you the most pleasure about your work or about the process of making your work? 

[JB] Just being totally deeply, when you just wake up thinking about it and it’s such a joy. Install as well, even if it’s quite hard because I’m a bit shy and a lot is happening. It’s been such a great experience getting to experience everything physically and feel everything on scale because I can’t print that beforehand because of how expensive it is. I love the intensity of that experience. What a cool thing to get to do. 

Images: Artist talk, Sarah Wall and Jack Ball in conversation, 2024, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2024. Photo: Olivia Pizzale-Bryce.
Images: Jack Ball, Heavy grit, 2024, installation view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2024. Photo: Jack Ball