Sarah Ball paints people who look back without blinking. Or perhaps they’ve blinked already, and what we’re left with is the residue—the arrested stare, the skin mapped in half-tones, the unfinished confession. There is in her portraits a composure that borders on refusal. The backgrounds say nothing. The faces almost say too much.

Before Ball became known for her crisp, archival-inspired portraiture—half-mugshot, half-mirage—she was exploring a more symbolic vernacular: children framed like totems, animals as proxies, mythic stillness rendered with unnerving simplicity. These early images remain rare on the market, and rarer still in exhibitions, but they cast a long visual shadow. There was nothing sentimental about them; they operated like field notes from a psychological ritual.

Her process remains studious. One image, sourced from a police file, revealed a faint discolouration near the hairline. Most would have missed it. Ball didn’t. She deduced the sitter had been a peroxide blonde—a detail unrecorded, but archived by the body. That is her mode: less portraitist than forensic folklorist, reconstructing identity from glances and shadows.

Today, Ball’s work is selling not just steadily, but voraciously. In 2024, several portraits—calmly sized, but clinically powerful—have fetched multiples of their estimates at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Works like Mark (2020) and Seyon (2020), both 100 × 100 cm, have become soft-spoken darlings of collectors looking for less noise, more precision. At the March 2023 Phillips Contemporary auction her work Elliot (2020) sold for £120,000 on an estimate of £60,000. Even her prints - when you can get them - now fetch double what they did a year ago.

This market shift is not about scale or trend. It is about recognition—an appetite for clarity, for restraint, for images that do not clamour for attention but tighten around it. Ball's sitters don’t perform, and the paintings do not flatter. What they offer is something rarer: a demand that the viewer come to them.