Jacqueline Surdell: The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive

The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive is a deeply personal ode to the mystical, visceral and illusory nature of forests. In tracing the psychic and physical imprints of history, memory, and myth within this environment, the forest is presented not as a backdrop, but a contemporaneous reliquary. Influenced by Jungian archetypes, feminist storytelling, and environmental histories, her landscapes suggest the invisible threads that link generations—through blood, myth, trauma, and resilience. In this space, memory is not fixed; it mutates, deepens, and expands. 

Jacqueline Surdell engages the forest as both witness and participant in human history. Industrial materials—rope, netting, and mesh—are twisted and suspended into dense, sprawling configurations that evoke wounds, altars, ecosystems and topographies. Techniques inspired by friendship bracelets infuse the work with intimacy and care, transforming utilitarian tools of labor and survival into gestures of connection and devotion.

Drawing from Catholic ritual, ancestral honoring, childhood storytelling and mythic structures, Surdell reimagines the forest not as a resolved metaphor but as a site of transformation and transcendence. Each artwork represents a complex moment representing both exile and of vision, where the sacred and the haunted coexist. They hold space for contradiction—grief and joy, violence and tenderness, play and survival—all in flux. This exhibition offers no conclusion. Instead, it invites witnessing without conclusion: a practice of staying with complexity, holding what cannot be solved, and allowing meaning to shift, contradict, and slowly unfold over time.