Jacqueline Surdell / Jacqueline Surdell

Jacqueline Surdell’s multi-dimensional tapestries bring to mind abstracted landscape paintings. Her sensitivity expressing the beauty and complexity of the natural world was acquired during childhood while accompanying her Grandmother, a plein air painter. Those close familial memories influenced her complex psychological terrain between body, making, sanctuary and spirit.

From childhood through college Surdell was a competitive athlete, accustomed to pushing the limits of physical endurance. She approaches her studio practice with the same disciplined resolve. Weaving her wall sculptures demands full body action, employing her body as a weaving shuttle, moving in and out of the warp, with pounds and yards of rope on self-made mural sized looms. Although her material is fiber, her approach is painterly, manipulating her medium with knotted layers, reducing the material to open the structure, draping to create volume and texture.

Jacqueline Surdell, b. 1993, was born in Chicago, Illinois. 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, Los Angeles, CA.