In the Studio with Mazy Path Founder Alexis Audette

A study in color and composition: Manhattan-based Mazy Path’s offerings include wallpapers, fabrics, pillows, and linocut prints.

Mazy Path founder Alexis Audette in her home studio.

Audette carves one of the blocks that she used to print her Pawpaw design.

Mazy Path’s Guava wallpaper conjures a taste of South Florida nostalgia.

The Hummingbird wallpaper “features flowers that gather around a hummingbird like planets orbiting the sun,” says Audette.

Panel of Perception II wallpaper panels explore the mind-altering powers and inherent beauty of psychedelic plants.

Audette’s linocut print, Sambucus Canadensis, is shown in front of two sketches for the print and an image of a wood engraving by Thomas Nason, an early twentieth-century printmaker whose work inspires the artist.

Willow Talk wallpaper explores how trees communicate with each other.

An original sketch for the Pawpaw pattern is pictured with Audette’s go-to tools: charcoal pencils and gouges for carving blocks.

For Alexis Audette, founder of Manhattan-based textile and wallcovering company Mazy Path, quite a lot, actually. When she came across a poem, “Rambles in Waltham Forest,” by nineteenth-century Irish poet Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, she discovered a phrase that spoke to her. The poem describes a meandering walk through the woods, both literally and as a metaphor for life, explains Audette. “She refers to this winding road, with all of its twists and turns, as a ‘mazy path’…. I just knew that was the right name for my business and my next chapter.”

Audette, who was forty-seven at the time, had been a longtime creative director at Beacon Hill for Robert Allen, and prior to that she was with Kravet. But she’d always dreamed of starting her own line. She grew up immersed in art (Mom was a painter), and after studying history as an undergrad, she got her MFA in textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Audette returned to her roots in block printing when she launched her company with a wallpaper line in 2020. Though her path was winding (even the planned launch at ICFF was foiled by the pandemic), her vision was steadfast: “I’m fascinated by botany and horticulture,” she says. Plants are her muse, and all nineteen of her designs—from Pawpaw to Winter Wheat to Virginia Strawberry—pay homage to the natural world in a bold, graphic way. Her latest collection, Food Forest, debuts in May.

As Mazy Path has evolved, Audette has branched into fabrics, limited-edition art prints, and notecards, all based on her own handmade botanical linocut prints. Her approach to the business side of things is purposeful. She’s represented by five showrooms (all women-owned), is committed to keeping her carbon footprint in check, and works with two digital printers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, which enables her to keep quality high and inventory to a minimum.

Audette, who is a one-woman show, admits, “I wear a lot of different hats, but I’m very left-brained and right-brained, so it works well.” Being her own boss has also allowed her to grow her company organically—and, of course, take time to enjoy the mazy path. mazypath.com