Ramsay art prize 2025 finalists: a giant teddy, a Scrub Daddy and a moving meditation on war
The Perth-born, Sydney-based artist explores themes of queer intimacy and desire in their winning work. 'Jack Ball's Heavy Grit impressed us with its experimental processes and sophisticated creative resolve,' the judges said. 'The work evokes a sensual response to the substance and aesthetics of the Australian Queer Archives to which the work refers, while proposing new possibilities for how we understand those archives in relation to contemporary culture and experience. We were particularly struck by the installation's restless, kinetic quality that refuses definition and creates an open opportunity to connect individually with the materials, forms and images the work deploys.' Photograph: Saul Steed
Alfred Lowe's practice, which is concerned with contemporary ways of navigating and manifesting identity and culture, is influenced by both the beautiful landscape of Central Australia, where he grew up, and its often-charged politics. These opposing ideals of beauty and pain fuel the artist's exploration of what it means to exist simultaneously in two conflicting extremes. By using radically contrasting materials, textures and colours, Lowe explores what it means to exist outside binary ideals. Photograph: Saul Steed
Encompassing moving image, photography, sound and installation, Christina May Carey's practice is rooted in the symbiotic relationship between the natural world, our bodies and consciousness. In this highly charged installation, Carey responds to a series of vivid hallucinations experienced by her during episodes of sleep paralysis. Operating on asynchronous loops, the work prompts a sense that opposing emotional states are playing out against each other. The body of work responds to a feeling of disequilibrium – a loss of our innate sense of our own bodies – as boundaries between work and leisure dissolve in an external world navigated through screens. Photograph: Saul Steed
A church pew, re-upholstered in advertising imagery, faces a shrine. The central icon of a Spider-Man painted in transparent washes, has been transformed into a more fragile version where the quiet persistence of the hand-made ascends against the advertising references to aspirational wealth and quick-fix religiosity behind it. Either side, Hoffie's avatar characters stare back, seemingly challenging the viewer's role in this space for contemplation. Hoffie offers poignantly humorous reflections on the capacity of art to ignite reimagined faith in the magical dimensions of life. Photograph: Saul Steed
Trained as a sculptor, Miguel Aquilizan uses found, scavenged and collected objects to create assemblages and sculptures. Working with a diverse range of objects, the artist explores environmental issues and social history through poetic narratives. In Post Vitruvian, Aquilizan evokes the Roman architect Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated drawing, Vitruvian man, a masterpiece of Renaissance art. Da Vinci's drawing represents his concept of the ideal body proportions of a man, with Aquilizan inviting us to ponder the accuracy and relevance of this ideal. Photograph: Saul Steed
Western Australian artist David Attwood uses everyday items to create assemblages that explore the influence of consumer culture on contemporary subjectivity. A kinetic sculptural assemblage, Sun (Sculpture for Frances Gabe) utilises a Scrub Daddy sponge attached to a reciprocating motor. The Scrub Daddy, made famous through its appearance on the American reality television show Shark Tank, has become an emblem for popular social media trends about home cleaning hacks and proficiency. Paying homage to Frances Gabe, an inventor who attempted to patent the self-cleaning house, Sun invites us to contemplate the gendered nature of housework and the gimmickry of consumer products that purport to decrease the domestic load. Photograph: Saul Steed
Turning the medium of painting against itself, Malik questions the histories of colonialism. Harnessing imitative techniques honed during a childhood spent voraciously copying old master paintings, Untitled recasts and filters Caravaggio's second version of Supper at Emmaus, 1606. Rejecting two-dimensional flatness, this mode of display strips the painting of its traditional aura and disrupts the church-like quality assigned to many exhibition spaces. Photograph: Saul Steed
Liam Fleming's sculptural glass works are characterised by a distinctive geometric purity and embody a sense of restraint and refinement, aligning his artistic practice with minimalism and its associated transcendental qualities. Fleming notes that, following years of production glassblowing and training, he 'finds redeeming qualities in [his] practice through the process of letting go. [He] … performs and sublimates his technical approach in the service of a vision that animates the essential enigma of [his] chosen medium and of life itself.' Photograph: Saul Steed
Drawing from his queer and Greek Australian background, Gogos's work spans textiles, design and runway shows and blends spontaneity with thoughtful material exploration. His process focuses on repurposing, recycling and sourcing deadstock textiles from friends and collaborators. Using techniques such as layering, compressing, felting and embroidery, Gogos's creations evolve through chance, with form dictated by the interplay of materials.Time Machine explores cultural and familial timelines, blending nostalgia with a playful, 'campy' spirit, reminiscent of an Austin Powers world. Gogos injects humour, dressing-up play and double entendres into his exploration of memory and identity. Photograph: Saul Steed
Pinchuk is a multidisciplinary artist who initiates her works through a phase of extensive research, data collection and fieldwork. Primarily, Pinchuk works with conflict topographies, in dialogue with literary legacies and the politics of translation. In The Theatre of War, the opening lines of Homer's epic war poem The Iliad are recited in three 'theatres of war': a performance stage from the siege of Sarajevo, a combat training camp for Ukrainian soldiers, and the tomb of Homer in Greece. Just as The Iliad commences in the ninth year of the Trojan war, Pinchuk's film was shot in response to the ninth year of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Photograph: Saul Steed
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