Robyn Waffle is an award-winning rug designer and multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. Through her studio, Waffle creates custom rugs, spatial textiles, and material compositions for interiors and curated spaces. Working across a vivid range of mediums, Waffle blends unexpected materials, colour, and texture to create expressive collections that honour the ancient craft of rug making while exploring the emotional impact of personal expression.

Practice

Robyn Waffle’s practice explores the relationship between surface, structure, and environment - positioning textile not only as decorative or functional, but as a spatial and conceptual medium.

Working between commissioned interior projects and autonomous textile works, each piece is developed through material research, scale, and context. Depending on placement, the work shifts between architectural integration and standalone presence.

Rather than separating art and design, the practice considers them as variations of the same material language - differentiated by setting, function, and viewing condition.

Approach

Every project begins with research into materiality and spatial context. Fibre type, weave structure, and surface behaviour are developed in response to intended context, whether residential interior, architectural environment, or curated setting.

The process moves through concept development, sampling, refinement, and production, with careful attention to proportion, composition, and installation.

Material Language

Robyn Waffle carries her passion for rugs into her art practice by combining natural hand-spun yarns from Nepal with hard, modern materials such as acrylic glass and mirror. The yarn holds warmth, tradition, and care, while the mirror and acrylic glass reflect a colder, fast-moving, manufactured world. Binding the soft fibres around the sharp edges of the glass becomes a quiet, meditative act in repair - where self-reflection occurs, and a tactile connection develops between the past and the present.

These elements establish a dialogue between warmth and manufacture, tradition and contemporary culture. The yarn carries associations of hand-making and material care, while reflective and rigid surfaces introduce qualities of distance, speed, and fragmentation.

An abstracted moth motif pulses through many of her pieces, referencing both the quiet damage moths cause to carpets, and the transformative alchemy of silk. This tension reflects cycles of making and unmaking, where loss and creation co-exist in tandem. Each finished artwork becomes a suspended moment - an orb of release, where the artist finds inspiration and hope.

Guided by a desire to honour the ancient tradition of rug making while engaging with the complexity of contemporary life, Waffle creates tactile works that are expressive, contemplative, and materially driven.

Commissions & Collaboration

Robyn Waffle undertakes commissions across residential interiors, architectural spaces, and curated installations. Collaborations are developed alongside interior designers, architects, and art consultants, with an emphasis on site-responsive material solutions.

Studio

Based in Toronto, the studio operates across independent artistic practice and commissioned projects throughout Canada and the USA.

— SELECTED EXHIBITIONS —

Rug Moths in Flight Installation - Enercare Centre - The Toronto Home Show - Toronto 2026

Where Wings Tangle: An Ode To Rugs - R:GALLERY - DesignTO Festival - Toronto 2026

Where Wings Tangle - Artist Project - Toronto 2025

Neutral Curves - R:GALLERY - Toronto 2024

Hypnotic Hush Collection - BDNY 2022 - New York City 2022

Future Nature Collection - IDS 2022 - Toronto 2022

Outside Looking In. - Artist Project - Toronto 2020

The Luna Collection - BDNY 2019 - New York City 2019

Baked Jewel Tones Exhibit - BDWest 2019 - Los Angeles 2019

Canada 150 Celebration - Two Pom Mosaic™ Installations - Heritage Properties - Toronto 2018

Woven Space - First Pom Mosaic™ Installation - Come Up to My Room - Gladstone Hotel - Toronto 2017

Elevation Window Display - Toronto Design Offsite Festival - Toronto - 2017

Arctic Sea Ice Installation - In Collaboration with Dystil - Interior Design Show - Toronto - 2015

Emery Street Records Launch Party - Farnham Quebec - 2014

Crease Pattern Window Display - Toronto Design Offsite Festival - 2014

Crease Patterns Collection - Interior Design Show - Toronto - 2014

Rug Stance Solo Show - Colourfield Gallery - Toronto - 2013

Accordion Collection - Interior Design Show - Toronto - 2013

Across the Line Collection - Interior Design Show - Toronto - 2012

Together Is Amazing - SHAW Cable Commercial - Vancouver BC - 2010

Spring Fever Solo Show - The Whip Gallery - Vancouver BC - 2010

Tidal Rising Solo Show - Anza Club - Vancouver BC - 2009

OZ Group Show - Anza Club - Vancouver BC - 2008

SLAW Solo Show - Charlie's Gallery - Toronto - 2008

Fashion Phantom Solo Show - Well & Good Gallery - Toronto - 2006

— EDUCATION —

Bachelor of Design & Communications - Ryerson University, Toronto CA

Marketing Major - Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne AUS

Abstract Painting - Lanagara College, Vancouver CA

— AWARDS —

Best Of BDWEST - 2019 - With PI FINE ART - Best New Wallcovering

BEST MODERN DESIGN - 2016 - The Carpet Design Awards - DOMOTEX (Hossein Rezvani entered one of Robyn Waffle’s original rug designs which won for Best Modern Design in 2016)

Design Lines Loves Award - 2015 - With Totem Design Co. - Lynx Crest Tapestry

Herman Miller Juror's Choice Award - 2013 - With Fugitive Glue - Rug Collection

Design Lines Loves Award - 2013 - With Modallion - The Gaga Rug