Artists
Jacqueline Surdell
From childhood through college Surdell was a competitive athlete. She approaches her studio practice with a disciplined resolve forged in the intense, repetitive, realm of competitive sports. Her years as an athlete primed her interest in repetitive, laborious, craft-based practices. Building her wall sculptures demands full body action, employing her body as a weaving shuttle, and her hand as brushstroke. Moving in and out of the warp, with pounds and yards of industrial 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.
Surdell approaches her studio practice with the meticulous precision of craft and the unbridled spontaneity of contemporary painting. She reimagines the woven canvas as a space of undulation and growth. As the expanded histories of painting materialize in her work as content, simultaneously, swollen tendrils and textures of bound rope deny illusions of the classically painted picture plane. The works actively work to bridge the division between painting and sculpture. In this way, her work calls into association other binary categorizations such as rigid and collapsed, construction techniques coded as masculine or feminine, and ontological spaces between body and sculpture. Her energetic and materially grounded practice brings to attention the tools, environments, and actions that contain and display performances of labor, history, and power.
B. 1993 in Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
