Wadah Abdalafatah

My life has always been intertwined with line and thread, which have marked many precious moments and memories for me. In my early years, I spent a lot of time in my father’s shop, where he was a creative tailor. I listened to the various conversations he had with his customers, some deep and some simple. All of them required me to pay attention and to understand the events and connect them with a thread of ideas, just like the thread that my father used to sew random fabrics together in certain ways, creating elaborate pieces of art that were ready to wear and impress everyone with his high level of dedication and craftsmanship. As I grew older, my attachment to thread increased, but in a different way and form, which was the line, the second simplest expressive element after the dot. I saw international artists breaking boundaries and producing truly creative works. I followed their footsteps and created my own works, mostly expressive portraits. But after a while, this became usual and normal for me. This was not exactly what I wanted from the line. I wanted to give it more freedom, in direction and thickness, and to free myself from the imagined, conventional idea and to rebel against it. I wanted to be satisfied with only shaping what the sense of the idea demanded at that moment. This led me to the latest abstract style I called it “Free Thread Forming”, which I am still working on developing and refining. This is a unique style that gives me complete freedom to express what I think or feel, or to take the role of another person in this expressive process, a person who may have ideas but may not be able to express them because words cannot capture them. This is where my role comes in, to extract them and bring them to light in another way, more eloquent than words.