Ishraq is a Jordanian textile artist, weaver, and Awassi wool developer. She attained an undergraduate degree in Architecture from Virginia Tech before pursuing her graduate study in Textile and Material Design from NABA-Milan. Ishraq’s professional journey took her across the fields of architecture, fashion design, and fashion journalism when, while covering textile fairs in New York City, she discovered something exciting called ‘textile innovation’. Her research-based, interdisciplinary design and art practice bridges these various disciplines through a fundamental appreciation of handcrafts. Her work strives to unveil the sophistication of traditional handcrafts- not through historicism- but as part of an affective economy which continues to be driven by everyday necessity, human innovation, and our eternal pursuit for beauty.
Ishraq specializes in Bedouin weaving and sustainable practices of processing wool from animal to finished product, and is currently involved in textile related initiatives in the Hudson Valley region (NY) where she maintains residence, and in her native Jordan. In 2018 she became a certified wool grader from the American Sheep Industry.
“I consider myself a student of fate, never a victim of chance; a Jordanian textile artist, weaver, and wool innovator fortunate to have had a journey spanning many industries and across several continents. I have always sought to carve a path towards a unique creative and cultural self-expression. My collaborative and interdisciplinary practice is not a combination of my past lives in architecture, fashion, styling, journalism, and textile design, but a palimpsest of the journey which traversed them. An evolving self-determination and critical self-reflection, continuously recycled or altered, but forever bearing visible traces of each earlier form.”
For consultations/ commissions/ collaborations | email ishraq@ishraqraikat.com
Ishraq weaving on the banks of the Hudson River in New York, during New York Textile Month, September 2021.