JACQUELINE SURDELL

| by Maria Rosaria Roseo |

Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois (USA), where she currently lives and works, Jacqueline Surdell is a young woman of many talents—first a professional athlete and later an artist, with a background from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies in 2017.

Family heritage plays a significant role in Jacqueline Surdell’s work. Her love for art and conceptual practice was passed down to her by her grandmother, a landscape painter. Her passion and interest in materials, their history and origin, and various processing techniques, on the other hand, were inherited from her grandfather, a steelworker in Hegewisch, a neighborhood in the south of Chicago.

After quitting volleyball, Surdell decided to dedicate herself to studio work. However, painting suddenly seemed static and overly conceptual, flat, and lacking dynamism. Working with rope, instead, offered her a more physical dimension, allowing her to reconnect with the principles and experiences she had developed over the years as an athlete. This medium became the channel through which she could express an authentic language that painting did not allow her to achieve.

Speaking about her creative process, Jacqueline Surdell explains how growth and repetition give her the sensation of building something large from something small. She describes how working with rope feels like weaving and knotting a representation of her own internal muscles, proceeding one line at a time, breaking down an element only to reconstruct it into an even stronger form.

There is, therefore, a close correlation between the craft of training the body—along with the mind and spirit—and Jacqueline Surdell’s practice. The entire process of creating her monumental suspended sculptures is an expression of intense physical effort, a disciplined, constant, and laborious practice that requires the action of the entire body. Weaving, knotting the rope, draping, the continuous repetition of gestures, and the use of sports equipment as an integral part of the artwork’s identity all reference the years she spent as a professional athlete.

As she herself recounts, her experience as an athlete allowed her to experience the playing field as a sacred space, a place where she was free to fully express herself: to scream, roar, bleed, curse, to take up space in ways that were not allowed in everyday life. Her body and mind were refined and strengthened through training, while her soul found nourishment in deep connections with teammates, coaches, and what for her became a rediscovered family.

From this totalizing physicality, which involves the artist in every phase of the creative process, the monumentality of her work emerges. Fabric has the intrinsic ability to hold, represent, and process complex emotions. Working on an imposing scale not only intensifies the expressive power of her work but also amplifies the potential of the material itself, creating a deep connection between the artist and the matter, between form and the viewer.

For Jacqueline Surdell, it makes sense to create works on a bodily scale or even larger, perceiving them as a kind of second nature. She emphasizes how this approach is deeply connected to her desire to bring a metaphorical world to life through the creation of physical and tactile environments. This pursuit materializes both in the realization of actual installations and in the idea of subtly infiltrating space, evoking landscapes or architectural contexts such as the interiors of rooms, churches, arenas, or amphitheaters.

Sculpture, painting, textile art—Surdell’s works undeniably sit at the intersection of different artistic genres, consciously escaping strict classifications, complicating the very idea of categorization, and challenging the value attributed to certain forms of labor and historical art categories.

Surdell’s approach to art remains, by her own admission, deeply tied to painting. The artist draws inspiration from Renaissance art and is drawn to religious iconography intertwined with the social and political aspects of the era, as well as the universality of symbols such as the triangle, the circle, and the cross. She also reveals her desire for her work to evoke a sense of wonder while maintaining a certain elusiveness. At times, she admits, when looking at her new creations, she finds herself wondering where they came from, describing them as eerie ruins of an unknown future.

Her work is fueled by intense physicality, a language that recalls the monumentality of matter, creating pieces that evoke strength, resilience, and transformation. Her art, suspended between past and future, asserts itself in space with an evocative power that surprises and fascinates, drawing the viewer into a profound dialogue with material and creative gesture.