‘Just Like Home’: Weaver Donna Foley feels at peace with her art

Donna Foley has a special relationship with the desert. She lives in New Mexico, but felt a calling to travel to Tucson with her weaving.
“I come from a different desert, but it still has that feel of the real Southwest,” Foley said. “I feel my work is really based in the Southwest desert — it doesn’t matter if it’s the Chihuahuan Desert or the Sonoran Desert. That’s the backbone of my weaving.”
She is showing her work from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Friday, Dec. 27, at DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun Little Gallery, 6300 N. Swan Road, Tucson.
Weaving is innate. She knew she wanted to be a weaver before she was a teenager, before she saw a loom.
“I would love to have that story of being a fourth-generation weaver,” she said with a laugh.
After high school, she earned a degree in forestry, as she was —and still is —enamored with the natural world. She’s not sure where or when working with her hands became important. When she learned to weave, she attended a local community college and became a crafts management major. Foley only enrolled in the weaving courses, and skipped the business requirements.
When her school received looms, she realized she found her calling.
“They had just put the looms in,” she said. “I was on my hands and knees putting them together. Everything clicked. I hadn’t sat down at a loom yet, but it felt like coming home.”
For more than 30 years, Foley has blended weaving traditions worldwide, as she said, “ancient and contemporary.”
“The rugs from the nomadic weavers of the Middle East, the woolen wares from Ireland & Scandinavia, the beautiful alpaca textiles of Peru and the strong weaving tradition of the American Southwest have all called to me and inspired me,” she stated in her bio.
“I feel what these cultures all have in common are their strong ties to their landscape as well as their tradition of shepherding their fiber animals, which immerses them in the rhythms of life and death that are inherent in such a lifestyle. I have also been immersed in this cycle.”
Her studio’s name, Four Directions Weaving, honors these diverse weaving cultures and “acts as a powerful symbol for my own sense of place, finding the balance between the attributes of north and south, east and west; warp and weft.”
Her materials are natural, as she raises sheep to produce the wool for her tapestries.
“I work with natural dyes on high-luster wool,” she said. “When I see pieces in museums, they are my colors. They’re from local plants that speak to my soul. I was having a hard time finding the color and nuances I knew I could get.
“So I started breeding Lincoln sheep, which are rare. I have my own wool supply and I get the colors I need. The collaboration speaks to my soul. I use the weaver to create something beautiful and meaningful.”
Foley said the tapestries, she envisions, are the maps of her spiritual journey.
“The topography is both an external terrain of the mountains and wilderness where I live as well as an internal landscape of meditations and dreams,” she said.
“The lustrous fiber from rare breeds of sheep and the traditional dyes from plants that I use to color their wool are important elements in my weaving. Many of my tapestries incorporate symbols such as petroglyphs, runes and I Ching hexagrams. ‘Found’ objects of stone, feather and beads often find their way into my work. This is my joy.”

Contemporary Southwest Weavings by Donna Foley
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Friday, Dec. 27
WHERE: DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun Little Gallery, 6300 N. Swan Road, Tucson
COST: Free
INFO: fourdirectionsweaving.com