Jacqueline Surdell

  • Jacqueline Surdell’s artistic approach is deeply informed by her familial and cultural history. Growing up, she witnessed two seemingly opposing worlds—her Polish grandfather’s grueling labor in Chicago’s steel mills and her Dutch grandmother’s peaceful plein air landscape painting. These formative experiences shaped her understanding of work, craft, and the body’s role in creation. Utilizing industrial rope, she weaves large-scale sculptural pieces on self-constructed looms, engaging her entire body in a process that fuses industrial production with fine art.
     
    At the intersection of textile, painting, and sculpture, Surdell challenges traditional artistic categories. Her woven reliefs—composed of twisted, bound, and tightly or loosely wefted ropes—pay homage to painterly traditions of depth and perspective while simultaneously exposing the illusionistic nature of the picture plane. Moving fluidly between these disciplines, she establishes her practice as one of transformation.
     
    Her work extends beyond material experimentation to interrogate broader themes of power, labor, capitalism, and sports culture. Raised in the Catholic Church, Surdell revisits religious iconography, using her physically intensive practice as a form of rumination and discovery. Through this lens, she considers the ontological nature of ritual, myth, the sacred, the monumental, and the sublime, questioning where she, and by extension, the body are situated within these structures.
  • Exhibitions
  • Surdell lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017; in 2015, she received her BFA from Occidental College in Los Angeles.
     
    Surdell's recent solo and small group exhibitions include, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL; East/East, Gallery Common, Tokyo, Japan  2022; Score! Devening Projects, Chicago IL  2022; Asymmetry, Library Street Collective,  Detroit, MI.
     
    Select group exhibitions includeBeyond: Tapestry Expanded, American Tapestry Alliance, Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, Greencastle, IN; Making Time, SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, IL; Toolbox@Twenty,  Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago  IL;  A Beautiful Mess: Weavers and Knotters of  the Vanguard, Bedford Gallery, San Francisco, CA; The Sowers, Fondation Thalie, Brussels, Belgium; This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE,  Amersfoort, Netherlands.
     
    Select recent residencies and awards forr Surdell include Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, VT; Artist-In-Residence, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; ACRE, Steuben, WI; Hatch Projects Resident, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago, IL.
     
    Surdell's work has been collected by the Joan Flash Artist Book Collection, Chicago, IL and Fondation Thalie, Brussels, Belgium.
  • Works
    • Jacqueline Surdell, by the skin of my teeth, 2024
      Jacqueline Surdell
      by the skin of my teeth, 2024
      Nylon rope, steel
      106 x 61 x 7 inches
    • Jacqueline Surdell, Dejma at night; contemporary perspective (after Kawahara Keiga), 2024
      Jacqueline Surdell
      Dejma at night; contemporary perspective (after Kawahara Keiga), 2024
      Nylon cord, cotton cord, custom steel frame
      70 x 105 x 15 inches
    • Jacqueline Surdell, Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto), 2024
      Jacqueline Surdell
      Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto), 2024
      Nylon cord, steel, polyester fabric, steel spool top, steel chain and meat hooks
      165 (body) x 252 (pole to pole) x 7 inches
    • Jacqueline Surdell, Our Light, 2023
      Jacqueline Surdell
      Our Light, 2023
      Nylon cord, steel, polyester fabric, steel spool top, steel meat hooks
      120 x 96 x 12 inches