Jacqueline Surdell constructs landscapes. Through weaving, knotting, and sculptural construction, she creates tactile reliefs that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Built from industrial cordage and steel, her works translate the language of landscape painting into physical form, investigating how landscapes are shaped, inhabited, remembered, and transformed. Her practice considers the ways humans attempt to preserve, engineer, and mythologize the natural world, revealing landscape as both a record of lived experience and an active participant in cultural and ecological change.
Drawing from the histories of landscape painting, material culture, and craft, Surdell examines forests, waterways, and constructed environments as living archives, where traces of devotion, labor, conflict, grief, and environmental transformation become embedded over time. Her sculptures oscillate between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers to encounter landscape as a physical terrain shaped by accumulation, tension, memory, and time.
Surdell has presented solo exhibitions at SECRIST | BEACH (Chicago), Gallery COMMON (Tokyo), Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts (Birmingham, AL), Louis Buhl & Co. (Detroit), Devening Projects (Chicago), and PSG (San Francisco). Her work has also been exhibited at The Hole (New York), BravinLee Programs (New York), the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, and Library Street Collective (Detroit). In 2025, she presented a solo booth with SECRIST | BEACH at The Armory Show, where her work was featured in The New York Times.
Surdell is the recipient of a DCASE Individual Artists Program Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship in Sculpture supporting a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2026, she was selected for Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center in New York. Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including The Peninsula Chicago.