By choosing to work with second-hand, or pre-used yarns and wool, Wadden is often short of the amount he needs and so compensates with matching filler which – along with the inherent process – affects the consistency of the final work and combines the aspirations of reductive modernist painting with the ’make-do-and-mend’ of a poorer domesticity.

In his Alignment paintings 10, 13 and 21, Wadden successfully merges the surface beauty and decorative connotations attached to weaving with the high-minded concerns of geometric abstraction, and echoes the ideas present in the work of such artists as Jim Iserman, Sheila Hicks and Anni Albers; openly celebrating the uneasy area between folk art and fine art.

Text by Gemma de Cruz