Our Purpose:
At Mazy Path, we want to start conversations about plants. In order to survive, plants depend on us and we depend on them. However, since 1950, two trends, urbanization and screen time (starting with television), have reduced our engagement with plants, and, more broadly, the natural world. With less time in the woods and more time on the web, we think, speak and write less about nature. Accordingly, nature-related words such “grass," “trees,” and “plants” have declined steadily in popular culture: books, movies, songs... Even the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has replaced words like “blackberry” and “buttercup” with words such as “blog” and “broadband.” The loss of these nature-related words matters because what occupies our thoughts, and what we name out loud, is what we care about. In other words, talking about nature is the first step toward saving it.
With that in mind, we place plants at the front and center of our visual, spoken, and written expression. We develop wallpapers that capture plants’ unique aesthetic qualities and physical characteristics: unusual designs that are literal conversation starters. In addition, we share plants’ stories at every opportunity, from our speaking engagements to the backs of our samples. We add these tales of botanical survival, adaptation and wonder to the public discourse so that they are widely shared. Our goal is to keep plants top of mind and on the tongue for their sake and for ours.
Our Inspiration:
We’re enchanted by the beauty of plants and the infinite ways that they enhance our lives. We also have a passion for block prints, relief prints that simultaneously convey nostalgia and immediacy. Our two loves come together in wall coverings based on handmade prints that explore plants and their stories.
Plants are our muse. We love them for their formal beauty, and we find wonder in all the ways that plants make our lives better and our planet inhabitable. Plants open our minds, nourish our bodies, oxygenate our air, consume our carbon and protect our coastlines; they are the gift of life.
As we develop our designs, we find inspiration in the work of early modernist designers and artists. The compositions of Arthur Wesley Dow, the color of Josef Frank and the craftsmanship of Gustave Baumann form a collective north star that guides our approach.
While pondering plants and our relationship to them, we gather images. The walls of our studio are festooned with pictorial references- flowering trees, undulating vines, wafting ferns- and loose charcoal sketches we create to capture the movement and expression of these living wonders.
Our Process:
Plants are our raison d’être, and prints are our language. In this art form a magical thread travels through the process of transferring a sketch onto a block, carving the block, inking it and pulling away a print. The image captures where the crevices were deep, where the ink was heavy, where our hands applied pressure. The print may go out into the world, but its snowy textures, expressive lines and areas of dense coverage will always appear to have just left the studio. This connection from maker to object is what animates our work and gives it a sense of soul. To translate our patterns into wall coverings, we use digital printing techniques in order to best capture the subtle textures and rich tonalities of relief prints.
Our Values:
Consideration of our environmental impact guides the choices we make regarding design subject matter, manufacturing partners, financial institutions and the organizations that we support.
Our wallpaper manufacturer prints our designs on Forest Stewardship Council certified paper grounds with water-based latex inks, uses recycled packaging materials and is located in Connecticut, not far from our New York City-based studio.
Our banking partner does not lend to fossil fuel companies, private prisons or gun manufacturers.
We are committed to supporting Seed Savers Exchange, a leader in the movement to protect the biodiversity of our food system by preserving rare, heirloom, and open-pollinated varieties of seeds.
Our Founder:
Alexis Audette was raised by a family of printmakers, painting conservators and art historians: enthusiastic naturalists all. She spent her childhood summers in Vermont meandering through the fields and woods that surrounded the family home, a nineteenth century farmhouse with bookshelves that beckoned with titles such as Masterpieces of Flemish Painting and How to Know the Ferns. Growing up in a world that revolved around art history and nature shaped her passions for printmaking and plants, both of which inspire her designs for Mazy Path. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and veteran of the textile industry, she lives with her family in New York and frequently wanders to Vermont.