Woman of the Week: Aminda Wood

by Sara Mahmood

Aminda Wood runs a boutique in Leslieville, selling what is best described as “reincarnated haberdashery."

There’s no easy way to define her work. Aminda creates a diverse range of items – jewelry, illustrations, coffee cuffs, hair accessories, and more.  “Every day I’m working on something different,” she says.

Many of her pieces are inspired by the art deco period, which ran from the 1920s to the 1940s. About four years ago, a friend lent her a book called La Vie Parisienneand Aminda was so captivated that she kept looking through it. She drew one of her favourite illustrations, “The Lady with the Fox Fur,” based on the book and thinks the illustration captures her inspiration from the deco period really well. After seeing the painting, Aminda’s friend told her to keep the book.

Aminda is also interested in artwork from before the deco period and says she is disconnected from modern trends because there’s a loss of the detail and care that is found in older pieces. Aminda is very environmentally-conscious and many of her pieces are made from combining old and new items. In the Reincarnated Haberdashery collection of jewelry, the central piece is always vintage or antique.

“My business is simply inspired by the idea of adding a little bit of unique beauty into a world where everything is mass produced cheaply and without meaning,” she says.“It’s a really necessary thing at this time on this Earth to look at what we have and stop overproducing what we don’t need.” Aminda hopes her customers will take a new appreciation for old things that are reinvented into something new by hand.

“From the way I dress, to my decor, I can offer people a piece of my perspective,” she says. She thinks beauty and positive energy are “very much the same.” When someone has one of her pieces, they have something made with positive energy.

Although Aminda always knew she wanted to pursue an artistic career, growing up in a small town like Niagara Falls didn’t offer her many options. In 2006 she moved to Toronto to pursue her artistic career. She ended up working as a tattoo artist for two years and then as a barista and doing some other “non-exciting jobs,” as she describes them, before she started her own business.

After she moved to Toronto, Aminda spent many years hoping she would meet a mentor or someone who would help guide her. Looking back now, she says “it’s easy to see that everybody’s path is different, and there is no right way to go about anything.” Realizing that no one will make something happen for you, she advises others “not to wait for permission, to treat whatever you are doing like a job,” and “to be confident and positive and to recognize synchronicity when it is leading you. All the signs appear quite clearly once you find your path, sometimes faster than you can read them.”

Aminda has been lucky to be supported by the people closest to her and is very conscious to give that support back to them.

Earlier this year, she found a Craigslist ad for the Arts Market, which wanted to rent out space for local artists to each have their own shops under one roof. Aminda applied and was accepted months before the market opened or even had a location. Later she discovered that she would be working just across the street from her apartment.

“I watched the building get painted and got to see the progress from my porch before the market was even open to the vendors to start moving in,” she recalls.

Now Aminda is one of the few artists that have been a part of the Arts Market since the beginning. Her boutique is decorated with vintage jewelry boxes, doilies and laces, giving it a lush, boudoir atmosphere. She’s also rented extra space so she can use her boutique as her studio and work out in the open, where customers can chat with her while she works.

Recently, Aminda has created a jewelry collection being sold in the gift shop for the Grace Kelly exhibit at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. She will be working with the TIFF Bell Lightbox again soon and is currently focusing on making lots of jewelry for the Christmas season. Once the holidays are over, Aminda is going to treat herself by working on paintings again. She also plans to make her own moulds and design her own full pieces in the future.

To find out more about Aminda and see some of her designs, visit her website at http://www.amindawood.com/.