The Fade of Fallen Memories

‘The Fade Of Fallen Memories’

It is now July 11^th, and I’m sat by the open window of my bedroom staring at this blank page, as summer rain falls silently on the garden outside. Once again, everything has taken so long to produce for this new picture that the enormity of where to begin makes my sentences stammer and break before my eyes. I have so much to say, it is the last big scene of the series and for me it really is the mountaintop I have spent five years clawing towards. After this there is just one small intimate picture and the project will be complete, something I am still struggling to imagine.

‘The Fade of Fallen Memories’ is a goodbye, both for the Wonderland story but also in my own reality. Sometimes the parallels between my work and life are entwined in such a way that it gives me chills and it brings me both happiness and sadness all at once. Above all, this photograph is about release. In Katie’s world it is the end of her time in Wonderland, the door being the final piece of the puzzle that fits the queen’s key that she has carried close to her heart throughout her journey. In my world, it is the metaphor for letting go of the years of grief I have carried with me and taking a final step back towards reality.

(Close up detail crop)

The truth is, I have never been able to look at a photograph of my mother since I lost her, at least nothing from the time when we were alive together. In my kitchen I keep a frame of faded, black and white pictures of her playing as a child and as a young woman, taken before I was born. Every morning I make my breakfast and say hello to this familiar ghost of a girl I never knew, who I love so deeply, despite having never met her at that age. My recent memories of us were destroyed by the hospital; they took her from me. What she became in the end was not like the flesh and blood that bore me. I have tried my hardest to block out those memories and send them as far away as I can, banished, like fallen angels and that is how the title of this work came to be. For me the hardest part is to let go of those nightmares, to let them fade and move forward and this has become my ‘door’. Once again Katie became my mirror, with both of us acknowledging it was time to move on, facing a wall that felt too big to push through, but spurred on by the promise of something better on the other side. It is an end and a beginning in one moment, exactly how I see the experience of losing someone you love.

In my mind I always knew the door scene would be one of my most difficult challenges because since I first imagined it over two years ago, it has become something almost impossible to live up to. Physically it had to be the most beautiful door I could possibly create, built in the name of kings and queens, and worthy of the lands that surrounded it. It also had to blend with the forest, be ancient, magical… the list goes on of all the things I felt it ‘had to be’. Above all, it was my goodbye to a place I have loved, a place that has helped me get through my grief. In my dreams I even imagined the door being left in the woods, like a memorial to the story, so the pressure to honour its importance felt immense.

When looking at the finished picture, many people may connect the concept of a portal between worlds with the story of Narnia and that was exactly my intention and inspiration. With it came the second challenge for myself, which was that I wanted to create a scene where both spring and winter would coexist. Like Narnia, I wanted the seasons on either side of the door to be radically different. Unlike films or books however, I could only express this in a single frame, so we shot in the spring and had to re-create winter as best we could. In my head I had always envisioned the forest like a Victorian theatre set, a staggered silhouette of leaves and branches, framing and guarding their secret within. I had dreamt of Katie arriving on the crest of her floral wave from under the wing of the forest’s protection. With each step towards the door I imagined her form changing one last time, she was smaller, more fragile, her hair returning to normal as the fantasy fell away revealing the girl she used to be. Above, the last light of spring shone through the vivid leaves, casting great tears of shadows that dissolved in dappled pools on the frozen ground. In her hand, the key silently waits for her last choice: whether to stay, or to leave.

Making The Door

Although it was a huge prop, creating the door was one of the most enjoyable things I have ever made. It was a complete indulgence and journey into the unknown: how on earth was I going to do it? As always, I start with the finished look in my head and then work backwards for what to do next, pretty much making it up as I go along. I started with a plastic cast of a nineteenth-century French door from a special effects company I had managed to track down. This became my base, to which I added ornate casts taken from the same period and some extra wooden pieces and trims I collected from
DIY stores. From this point on everything else was made and hand-painted by myself, until Matt built the frame we would need to support the structure on location. It was slow going, the plastic was incredibly thick and hard to cut, there were blisters and tears, but the end effect was everything I could have hoped for. It was monumental.

The floral coat was made by me. The key was also hand made by me in 2011, from pieces of antique carvings and old rabbit bones. It belonged to The White Queen, and has been carried by Katie around her neck ever since that part of the story ( without anyone knowing its purpose)

SHOOT DAY

I doubt I will ever be able to fully express the level of exhaustion we went through for this picture. It was wonderful, impossible madness involving every level of emotion.

I first need to explain a few factors that made this difficult day even tougher to get through. It began a week before the shoot, when the BBC News requested to film me at work on location. This was something I felt I simply couldn’t turn down despite the fact I am very camera shy and it would add significant stress to the day. Second, I had just begun my ambassadorship with Nikon and would be shooting the picture using a brand new camera I had never used before. Third, this was the first day I would meet Richard Wakefield, our new filmmaker, which meant two sets of cameras pointing at me, when I was at my most fragile. These factors were then added to the biggest problem of all: getting the enormous door to the location and set up. Typically, the area I had chosen was through a wood and down a dangerously steep slope of wet leaves. I always keep my team very small in order to maintain
a sense of intimacy on set, which meant we had hours of carrying to deal with, including the major issue of transporting the one hundred bags of flour I had bought to create our ‘frost’!

On the morning of the shoot I lay awake staring at rain clouds through my window. I hadn’t slept for two days and couldn’t eat – my stomach was in knots from stress. All I could think about was what would happen to the beautiful floral coat and the door if it rained, but there was nothing to do but face the music and push on. Once we arrived, it took over three hours to get all the equipment and the pieces of the door to the location. There were only six of us to carry everything
and it was the most demanding set build we had encountered. I can’t even begin to explain the comedy of the bags of flour:
it started with Matt and Mark attempting to pull all one hundred bags loaded on to a car trailer through the wood like a pair of horses. They battled for over an hour until the trailer became stuck in the undergrowth and they collapsed in an exhausted heap. After that we had to resort to dragging huge gravel bags full of the flour on foot, swearing and groaning the whole way. We were already wiped out before the BBC arrived at eleven that morning, and as the cameras were switched on, my anxiety went through the roof. Richard set up a time-lapse film of the area and work began on building the door.

Once the main structure was up and stable, adding the flour was one of my brief moments of relief during the pressure of the day. We all laughed as we covered the floor, the leaves, door and branches. On top of the flour I also added a huge sack of artificial snow pulp to bulk up the amount we needed by Katie’s feet. It was such a simple moment of pure happiness, kicking the pulp and throwing flour in the air, all in the name of creating something magical, deep in the woods.

Being interviewed by the BBC on location

Throughout the day the weather was wildly unpredictable, the sky was constantly threatening to rain and every now and then we had to run to the door with plastic covers to protect it from sudden showers. The sun toyed with our hopes as glimmers of light would come and go – I had no idea what would happen if it became too dark; we had no lighting equipment and none of this could be created again. It was a lot to deal with in front of the television crew and the whole time I had to repeatedly explain the Wonderland story and my motives to the reporter while trying to concentrate on the job in hand.

It was around that time, as I frantically attached ivy to the top of the doorframe, that I caught myself stopping and noticing the wind change on my neck. The leaves all around were fluttering, almost chattering with excitement as if an energy was coming; it felt like the electricity in the air before
a storm. Maybe it was just adrenaline and lack of sleep but I swear I felt, just quietly, that my mother was with me. Slowly sunlight began to break through the clouds and light up the entire door. It could not have been more beautiful. Rays fell through the leaves casting huge sweeping shadows that washed over our feet as the ivy shivered in the breeze, refracting a myriad of patterns all over the set. Everything seemed to shake to life and in a single unsaid moment we all looked at each other and knew it was now or never.

I shouted for Katie to be brought on set, the film crew fell back and I placed the tripod in position. I remember awkwardly fumbling around with this completely alien camera as heat grew in the pit of my stomach, but when I looked through the lens, none of it mattered: it was more magical than I ever could have hoped for. The light had raised the entire scene to a level that would have been impossible to create myself. Sometimes nature rips through your ideas and turns them into a vision you couldn’t have possibly predicted. It is something I have learnt over the years to embrace and now love. My heart was pounding, I could feel the BBC camera burning through my skull, but ahead and all around me were the things I loved: my friends, our Wonderland, a shimmering dream come to life. So I let go, forgot my nerves and pressed the shutter release.

We shot for as long as the light stayed with us, we had also brought an artificial snow machine and huge smoke grenades for added magic. We laughed, we whooped and shouted with delight as these various effects were hurled at the set. The smoke seemed to cling to the treetops like an Amazonian mist, dramatically changing the mood and making the sky seem even more surreal. It was just then as the last of the smoke faded, that the heavens darkened and our precious sunlight vanished, as if a spell had been broken. The wind began to rush through the leaves, the door began to rattle, and as we all looked up at the May sky a hailstorm came from nowhere. We ran, squealing with our cameras, throwing plastic sheets over Katie and the door, until we managed to squash the entire team under one small shelter we had set up earlier in case of an emergency.

It was the strangest thing, watching as hailstones thundered down, bouncing off the grass in the middle of spring. I remember staring glassy-eyed at our set as I watched it dissolve, the irony of real ice destroying our make-believe efforts. Absentmindedly, I pushed chocolate into my mouth, having realised I hadn’t eaten since the day before. I couldn’t stop running it all through my mind, I had no idea the sun would hit the door the way it did, we could have built the set in complete shade for all I knew. How odd that we had literally been given one precious window of light, and then it was gone – swallowed up the very second we let off the last smoke grenade – and now it was all destroyed. I was dazed, drained, exhilarated, relieved and I thought of mum.

When the hail stopped I looked behind us at the looming hill back to the van, the soaked door and the enormous sodden piles of flour on the ground knowing that we had at least another three hours of carrying and cleaning up to go. It is times like this that I am so lucky to work with the team I have. In truth, we are all just friends first of all; I recognise everyone’s great talents but at this point only friends could shrug, roll their eyes and get on with the job. We had to leave the scene exactly as we found it and that meant being on our hands and knees, clawing piles of dirty wet flour into rubbish sacks and hauling door panels, equipment and endless kit back up the dreaded hill. It was dark and late by the time everything was loaded back on to the van. Everyone was shaking with exhaustion, starving, and by the looks of Mark and Matt, who had taken the lion’s share of the carrying, it had been a push too far. We clung to the sides of the cars
in the night air, half hysterical but still somehow laughing at the state of us all. We were truly broken. I was dirty, tired and cold, but I felt incredible. Nothing else makes me feel this way; I just can’t explain it. It is the most raw of sensations, to go out into the landscape and push yourself through something so challenging and to be repaid with an experience you would simply never see again. I had talked briefly with Richard at the end of the day, but felt bad that I hadn’t spent more time with him. I had no idea what he had filmed and whether he thought it was all a load of chaos or something wonderful. The next day as I packed for my gallery opening in Amsterdam I started receiving messages from the gang. I remember sitting on my bed and laughing a little teary-eyed as Mark, Richard and Saskia texted me, saying it had been one of the most extraordinary days they had ever had; how much they had loved it, how badly they ached, how crazy the weather had been – and how the day had been unlike anything else they could think of. It meant so much that we had all felt the same and it wasn’t just me.

A few weeks later, Richard sent me the first rough cut of the film. I had no idea what to expect and half-winced in anticipation as I pressed play. I think it was around thirty seconds in before I began to cry, I had never expected the wave of emotion that poured through me when I saw our little team at work. He had captured everything – the light, the shadows, and the exhaustion. It was a fragile, and honest portrait of Wonderland. It was my friends, who have been together since 2009 when this whole crazy journey first began. In the five years since, we have grown together, learnt a lot, but are still laughing, still complaining and always giving everything we have on the day. At times the film was more like a quiet observation of us through the leaves and the air around us. The music filled my heart, and it felt like watching us through the eyes of my mother, just as I had felt her presence on the day. I fell apart; I loved every moment of the film. I had never seen us like that before and I am so grateful to Richard for his beautiful work.

Watching it now, over a year later, one scene has gained new meaning for me that I suppose I never registered at the time. It was the moment I gave Katie the key. I played it again and again, and watched myself step into her world, from mine – the walls of our parallel lives gone. For that one brief moment we were connected through our grasp of the key. It was like I was finally meeting her and letting her go in real life all at once. The key would unlock her next step, setting her free, just as creating this series has saved me from grief. Now all that was left was for us to each face our doors, and move forward, one last time.