JACQUELINE SURDELL | Score! | May 14 – June 25, 2022

I am an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in fiber. Primarily, I use rope and other industrial textile materials to reconsider painting histories and techniques through the lens of craft and material culture. My current body of work abstracts and questions ideas of landscape painting, specifically, as a flat, static, painted object. I am drawn to the ways landscape offers perspective on our current world through examinations of the past; suggesting alternative connections between historical memory and our present day. — Jacqueline Surdell

Textile is transformative. Rope, specifically, is a material that contains pure potential. In my studio, rope transforms from limp lines into dense, expanded, evolved, three dimensional forms. Rope is sneakily strong – it can lay limp and folded and then be activated to carry and hold immense amounts of weight. Rope embodies the paradox that is connection: coming together alongside the possibility of being tied down and controlled.
— Jacqueline Surdell

Exuberant and improvisational, Jacqueline Surdell’s free-form tapestries made from thick ropes and lines nearly dance off the wall. They nod to the warp and weft of traditional fiber works, but with these hefty woven pieces, Surdell has achieved a kind of painterly freedom in execution that is both novel and exhilarating. In overall shape she allows some scope to the effect of gravity, with elements of the artworks seeming to sink downward, referencing natural forms like bird nests or insect cases. Clotted knots and twisty braids surround circular portals, while individual cords escape and crawl across the floor. — K. A. Letts, review for Asymmetry at Library Street Collective, Detroit. Detroit Art Review.

I think of my studio practice as a space that fluidly moves between physical and intellectual processing. The act of processing comes from repetitive work that engages both the right and left sides of the brain. Thinking through working or working through thinking. For me, the work is about those moments of transition between experiencing something (maybe it’s trauma or simply something new) and that transition between the thing happening, understanding, and then letting go, or coming out on the other end. These moments change you. You are transformed in some way. It is a paradoxical process of learning to accept what is out of my control while working towards something better. — Jacqueline Surdell