Jack Ball works primarily in photography, employing collage, embellishment and performance to create riotous installations of visual excess. For their first solo exhibition at PICA, Ball addresses the full space of the West End Gallery with large and small, figural and abstract images layered and accompanied by a series of sculptural works made in situ. These intimate and ambitiously scaled works bring together references from a range of time periods and contexts, combining fragmented bodies, interrupted sequences and abstract forms to reflect a resistance against the fixity and finality of the image. 

Ball’s practice draws on an extensive digital archive, moving between analogue and digital processes as they alter the scale and texture of images. Using techniques of layering, cutting, cropping, enlarging, printing and re-photographing, their compositions contain visible seams, scratches and stains on brilliantly hued and colour-saturated surfaces. Ball embraces the ‘messiness’ afforded by these processes to ‘complicate, challenge, bring playfulness and pleasure to trans photographic representations in art spaces.’