Ramsay Art Prize 2025 - Artist Talks

Join us for two panel discussions featuring finalists in the Ramsay Art Prize 2025 as they dive into the creation and themes explored in their works.

Limited seats available, please arrive early to avoid disappointment.

11am - From Tapestries to Tableaux

Hear from Ramsay Art Prize finalists Emma Buswell, Bridie Gillman and Gian Manik in conversation with artist and Ramsay Art Prize judge Julie Fragar as they explore the expanded field of painting and revival of the tableau.

Emma Buswell
Buswell is an artist, curator and designer fascinated with systems of government, economies and culture, particularly in relation to constructs of place, identity and community. Her current work takes its inspiration from the matrilineal hand craft and knitting techniques passed down from her grandmother and mother, as well as a contemplative investigation into the nature of kitsch, ephemera and national identities.

Bridie Gillman
Working in an expanded field of painting, Bridie Gillman's multidisciplinary practice spans painting, ceramics, photography, video, and sound. Drawing upon a childhood spent in Indonesia, her work is underpinned by ideas of place. In recent years, Gillman's painting and sculptural practice has become a meditative act of recalling experiences and memories of a place through abstraction of colour, shape, form. While each artwork is based on a specific observation or experience, they are an emotional reaction rather than a representation of place.

Gian Manik
Manik considers his practice to harness dextrous approach to image-making, characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik seeks to ambiguate tradition through the representation of symbolically multivalent and tangential subjects.

2pm - Power Play

Hear from Ramsay Art Prize finalists Jack Ball, Callum McGrath and EJ Son in conversation with Leigh Robb, Curator, Contemporary Art as they explore themes of power, politics and the re-construction of history through alternate methodologies.

Jack Ball
Jack Ball grew up in Boorloo, Perth and moved to Gadigal, Sydney two years ago. In 2024 they had a major solo exhibition at PICA and they are currently part of the One Year Studio Program at Artspace. In 2021 they had a solo exhibition at AGWA and they have been part of group exhibitions at MCA, AGNSW, AGWA, Artspace, PICA, and MAPh. Ball’s practice involves large-scale photographic and sculptural installations that explore the pleasures of flexi and fluid materiality and desire.

Callum McGrath
Born in Meanjin/Brisbane and based in Naarm/Melbourne, Callum McGrath is a research-artist whose work questions and challenges institutional modes of historicising and archiving. His practice interrogates the ways that powerful structures dictate how historical data is sustained and reproduced. Grounded in queer contexts, McGrath’s work is driven by a continual questioning of the status of truth in history and the conditions of knowledge. The work centres on queer stories and figures often left out of mainstream narratives, taking an ambivalent position towards these complex stories, with the hope of situating the viewer as an active participant in the work’s meaning.

EJ Son
EJ Son is a Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, new media, video, and installation. Their practice explores power, desire, and contradiction through humour and provocation, often investigating how intimacy, surveillance, and emotional regulation manifest through our relationships with objects. EJ creates sensorial, often interactive environments that explore the emotional and political tensions of contemporary life. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, with upcoming solo and group exhibitions across Australia and South Korea.