Lavender Princess

I came across the work of Kirsty Mitchell via flickr a few years ago. It was her ‘Lavender Princess’ image (above) that I first saw and I was immediately hooked. I’d never seen anything like it and I was smitten…head over heels in love in fact! It’s actually hard for me to articulate how Kirsty’s work makes me feel but needless to say she transports me to a magical world with every image that I’m lucky enough to see.

If possible, Kirsty’s story is even more moving than her incredible images. Get ready to be inspired…

The Faraway Tree

Hi Kirsty, can you tell us your story – how you started in photography and a little bit about your journey from then till now?

I studied analog photography many years ago when I was 18 at art school, but this was before digital became mainstream. It was my first contact with the medium, and sadly I felt defeated and frustrated by my tutor’s focus on the technical processes rather than creative expression. I saw photography as an art form not a science, and so in the end I followed a career into fashion design instead. It was another 13 years until I picked up a camera again in the summer of 2007. I was in the process of recovering from 4 months of chronic insomnia brought on by posttraumatic stress. The drugs I had been prescribed, had numbed my senses to the point where I had pretty much lost all awareness of touch, temperature and interest in the lives of the people around me, I was a zombie. I was undergoing hypnotherapy and slowly things began to return, but my sensitivity came back at an almost heightened state. It’s hard to describe without it sounding like a cliché, but it was like I was seeing the world for the first time, and I had an overwhelming urge to record everything around me.

So I simply started with a little point and shoot I kept in my handbag, and just took as many pictures as I could on the way to work, on the train, the bus, wherever I was. It was a sudden and very emotional awakening, that I still can’t explain, but it was utterly addictive to me. It was shortly after this that my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and I was thrown into the horrors of her treatment and decline. My camera became my escape and my only outlet for self-expression. As well as street photography, I began photographing myself, creating more and more elaborate pictures, to push the real world as far away as I possibly could.

Tragically my mother died in 2008, and that was the catalyst for beginning my project ‘Wonderland’ in her memory. It is such a complicated story it is impossible to explain everything in a short answer, but it is this work that 2.5 years later has gained a world wide following, and led me to leave my career in fashion to work as an artist.

The Queen’s Armarda

I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. Wonderland is such an amazing thing to dedicate in her memory. Can you tell us a little more about the overall artistic idea and direction for the series?

The project and its origins are extremely personal and emotional to me on levels that might not always be apparent to the casual viewer. The series is my tribute to the memory of my mother who as I already mentioned passed away in November 2008. She was my best friend; and died miles away from her family and friends in the UK, after moving to France for her retirement.  She was too ill to bring home, and so she had a tiny funeral that broke my heart. I remember walking away on that day wanting, and needing to do something that would let people know who she was, and how she had touched the lives of so many children. She had been an English teacher all her life, and spent years inspiring her students, and myself with her passion for literature and her captivating stories. She had read to me everyday until I was too old to admit it to my friends, and instilled a belief in beauty and wonder that has now become the root of my work. So I decided this was how I wanted her to be remembered, to create something that would celebrate her gift to others – magical worlds full of colour and endless possibility.

Six months after her passing I began work on the concept of creating a visual storybook without words, of unexplained beautiful strange characters, each within their own magical worlds. I never planned for the series to grow in the way it has, or to last over 2.5 years. It just evolved constantly, and seemed to capture the imagination of so many online, that it began to have its own following.  The support of so many kind people has spurred me on, and I am now entering into the final stages of the project. The final focus is the publish a book and create an exhibition of the entire series in her memory.

How many Wonderland shoots have you done so far and how do you come up with each idea?

There are over 54 pictures in the series that are currently public, with another 15 scenes to come, which I have already shot and am in the process of editing and uploading. I have lost count of how many actual shoots we have done, but I’m guessing it’s around 40. You see every single picture is more or less a whole shoot. I treat the images as individual artworks like paintings, so I don’t take endless pictures of the same thing. Each character has its own part to play in the series and won’t be repeated constantly, unless the image is completely different or re-shot on a different location. Sometimes it’s so hard to do this after months of work, to only choose a maximum of 2 pictures from a shoot, but I want everything to have a high impact, and not over saturate an idea.

With regards to the ideas that’s the easy bit, I have too many, and they are almost always the result of dreams and the broken fragments of the memories of my mother’s stories – the hard bit is making the idea once I have it!

The Fairycake Godmother

There is a real sense of the journey you have been on since 2008 on your blog. Are there other images that are too raw for public view?

Yes, I have since taken down some of the self-portraits I had on flickr during the final weeks of losing mum, simply because they were just too personal. At the time the pictures were my self-expression and although the Internet is obviously public, I somehow felt more able to bare my soul in that forum than talk to any of my friends about what I was going through. I needed a place to let rip, and I did … but now my life is different and I don’t want them seen anymore. Some pictures never made it out of my computer and I look at those sometimes and they break my heart, they are so sad.

I imagine that when some people first see the Wonderland images, they would assume that a large team was involved and there were masses of post-production for each one. However because it is just you and a very small team, do you think that you are able to keep a sense of intimacy despite the large sets? Is there a particular reason why you’ve kept the teams small, worked with mainly the same people and that you still choose to hand make everything yourself?

Wonderland is obviously deeply emotional for me, and I started it at a time when I was very ill with grief. My ‘team’ at the time was basically me, and a complete stranger Elbie Van Eeden who was a hair and make-up artist I had met online. Neither of us knew when we finally met in person what was about to happen to us, and what the project would become. Elbie became a sudden special friend to me through some of the worst months of my life – Wonderland was our baby and our escapism from jobs we were unhappy in and my grief. It was our playground, where we would run off to the woods at the weekends with our long suffering muse and model Katie Hardwick, and just made up our own magic.

As the project progressed I had no intention of changing Elbie for anyone else, we were in it together, and we grew as a team and as friends. Over the months lots of people wrote to me asking to be assistants, but I didn’t want a huge crowd on set. Usually the locations are quite private places in the woods, and I don’t want to draw attention to us, or disturb the wildlife. I also think you cant get that emotional connection with the model if you have a massive entourage. I want to be around people I trust, who respect the surroundings and understand the sentiment behind it all. I’m very protective over what I do and quite private in some ways (hence no twitter account!)

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