Work

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.

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.

RUG MOTHS IN FLIGHT: NATIONAL HOME SHOW (2026)

In March 2026, Robyn Waffle was invited by the National Home Show’s Creative Director, Tiffany Pratt, to transform two beat-up shipping crates into an art exhibit for the entrance of the show. Embracing the design challenge, Robyn created two dynamic works of art by weaving together elements from her “Where Wings Tangle” series. By layering her Rug Moths, carpet swatches, rose-gold mirror, and vinyl foam cut-outs, Robyn says it felt like she was building two massive multi-layered cakes. But instead of icing, the artist used copper wire, yarn, and finishing nails to tether her moth motifs to the crates and carpet piles. Robyn’s completed shipping container installation (x2) was a true glow-up - whimsical and vibrant within the expansive, space-age lobby space of Toronto’s Enercare Centre.

WHERE WINGS TANGLE: AN ODE TO RUGS (2026)

Continuing in her exploration of rug design as an art form, Robyn honours the skilled Nepali weavers she has been collaborating with for over a decade. Installed within R:DESIGN’s 50-foot tunnel, Robyn combined acrylic glass, mirror and hand-spun yarns to create a series that embodies a poetic reflection of her passion for rugs. An abstracted moth motif pulses through each piece; evoking both the quiet destruction moths inflict on carpets and the subtle alchemy of silk from which rugs are made from. Robyn Waffle’s newest exhibition is a celebration of tradition, texture and cross-cultural collaboration, where playful artwork and luxurious rug design converged and created a transformative experience within R:DESIGN’s dynamic showroom.

WHERE WINGS TANGLE: ARTIST PROJECT (2025)

Robyn Waffle debuted a new body of work at Artist Project in 2025. A true labour of love, self-reflection, and experimentation, Robyn’s new series features a variety of mixed-media pieces, ranging from tiny watercolour collages to expansive multilayered abstracts, composed of wood, textiles, hand-spun yarns and acrylic glass.