by Siân McIntyre.

Ball’s exhibition Mystery Solved is installed in Passage Gallery, a shopfront on level 1 of Chinatown’s Prince Centre, Sydney. While photography is the initial process of Ball’s image making, their work moves through multiple stages of abstraction. Images are shifted through crop, zoom, cut, scale, layer and collage to play with texture, colour, and form, allowing us to lose ourselves in the goopy, messy beauty of making and material. The installation, viewed through the gallery's glass frontage, is a tangle of collaged prints. The textures are juicy, wet, tasty, slimy, sexy, slippery, hard, soft, cool. They are bodily—but bodily insides—stomach linings, veins, mucus.
        The cotton rag prints are supported by materials of utility: S hooks, screw hooks, rope. Each has been treated with tenderness and curiosity. By dipping S hooks, screw hooks and rope ends in wax, Ball transforms mass-produced hardware into embellished accessories; they are claimed and coated. The process of dipping by hand is traced on the objects, some with drips suspended in motion as wax set on the cool metal. The wax flows through the exhibition; looking through the window, you notice that the feet of some prints show tide marks from multiple wax dips, speaking beautifully to the watery text commissioned by Dylin Hardcastle that accompanies the exhibition.
        Screens are hung behind the suspended prints towards the back of the gallery, encouraging the viewer to peer between the sculptures to see looped videos of liquid gushing—the colours are hyper—pink frothy water running beside a car wheel, foaming white beside an orange net. These contrasts of fluid form with industrial mass-produced objects play with our conception of un/natural. The pink water is chemical off-stream from an industrial area; the orange plastic net beside the foaming running water is echoed by a cotton rag print behind the screen that is glossy, fleshy, marbled, like dyed salmon flesh. Natural is synthetic.
        Ball tells me that the abstract shapes of the large-scale prints are taken from airport runways—roads designed for efficient taking off and landing. Installing the shapes as overlapping objects transforms them from regulated road maps into chaotic clusters of paths and detours. Some are cut into strips and arranged like impotent horizontal Venetian blinds. Eyelets are studded along the edges with nuts and bolts securing each strip to a vertical trunk. Prints suspended with ropes and hooks are anchored down by silky, sausage-shaped sandbags. They slump on the floor, corseted by the taut ropes that attach them to the hanging prints.



There is movement between suspended cotton rag paper, nuts, bolts and eyelets, coiled ropes, slippery sandbag weights, running fluids contrasted with static industrial objects. This tangle of materials and images viewed as a whole through the window is stunning, but peering beyond the glass wall boundary—through the gaps that Ball has created between prints, to the screens, to the ceiling, to the walls—we are taken inside a private diorama, a scale model of a something that refuses classification.
        Ball describes how material from the Australian Queer Archives informed the development of this work, in particular, newspaper clippings from the 1960s to 1980s that were saturated in anti-trans rhetoric. One could argue that we don’t need to delve into the archive to see anti-trans media, but perhaps the archive provides a lens to view the hatred that allows for distance. By referencing historical transphobia, Ball can point to what we are seeing today with the knowledge that this is not new, that others survived it before them, and that delicious, embellished, joyful and collective movement tested rigid straight lines long before the archive—and after.
        The title Mystery Solved feels almost tongue in cheek when considering this layered research and tenderly detailed installation. Ball describes the images as ‘assembled through a dyslexic logic, a slippery grammar in which images are guided by texture, sensation, and sticky, sweaty feelings.’ None of this is straightforward. That is not the intention.
        Ball is generous to share this work with us. We have seen how divergent identities of artists are either celebrated or attacked in direct response to funding interests. Ball’s show took place a month after Jazz Money’s book was pulped, while Barbi Ghanoush received threats for running Drag Bingo for Palestine events, during Sydney Writers’ Festival, which was lobbied to follow Adelaide Writers' Week’s lead and cancel an appearance by Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah. Mystery Solved opened during the Biennale of Sydney, which cancelled Bhenji Ra’s ambassadorship following pressure from lobby groups and board member Morry Schwartz. Ra released a statement on 16 June outlining the ‘media harassment and doxxing’ she experienced due to her ‘public opposition to genocide in Gaza.’ The newspaper clippings Ball references in this work are not static historical documents; the content is regurgitated whenever identity transitions from novelty to threat. Referring to the newspaper clippings from the 1960s to 1980s, Ball states ‘In these articles our bodies are objectified, scrutinised, and questioned inappropriately by cisgender people. Themes of fraudulence, secrecy, and truth are seen throughout.’
        Ball’s gentle push and pull with body, texture, natural and unnatural, visible and invisible in Mystery Solved is inseparable from the political climate that stifles it. In this context the title becomes subversive; the exhibition obfuscates any straight lines between mystery and solution. Ball’s decision to exclude the audience from entering the gallery delineates their space from the public forum. Behind the wall of glass Ball’s sculptural collages play, flirt, and entwine without uninvited bodies entering or disrupting. Ball keeps the mystery close, because, as Bhenji Ra states, ‘What’s visibility without protection? A trap.’



Jack Ball, Mystery Solved, Passage Gallery, 22 May – 17 July, 2026.

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Header images: Installation photographs of Jack Ball’s Mystery Solved, at Passage Gallery, photographed by Document Photography.