From Sohag to the World: Egypt’s Center of Textiles and Art

‘‘My father always told me: in Sohag, the moment you open the door, nature greets you,’’ says Gehad Abdalla, an Egyptian artist originally from Sohag. ‘‘Everything we create comes from nature. It’s in our craft, in our hands, and pieces of it now sit in places like the British Museum and the Met in New York.’’

In Sohag, nature is not the neatly trimmed trees that city dwellers know. It is not organized into tidy lines or curated like an exhibition. It is raw, real, and authentic, like clouds drifting across the sky, forming shapes one could try to recognize but never fully can. Nature, in Sohag, resists being tamed, refuses to be forced into human order, and instead compels one to wrestle with it, to try and understand it on its own terms.

The mountains in Sohag never shy away from their rough edges or their untamed lines. The Nile continues to carry ancient stories, told from one generation to the next. History in Sohag is bound together in the same way the river flows, without pause and without end. In Sohag, history preserves inscriptions, songs, dances, tales of the hunt, and the daily life of agriculture, all rooted in the ancient city of Akhmim in the northeast of Sohag.

These traditions are passed from one person to the next kept alive and guarded, which is why they run through the work of artists like Gehad. Now the owner of her own design studio in Australia and a design student at the University of Western Australia (UWA), she carries these traditions and the soul of Sohag within her practice.