‘Wonderland’ is created in memory of Kirsty Mitchell’s mother Maureen, an English teacher who died of a brain tumour in November 2008. In the months that followed her family’s tragic loss, Kirsty fell into a deep depression. Struggling to cope with the demands of her job as a fashion designer and overwhelmed by grief, she found sanctuary in the woodlands that surrounded her home in the English countryside. There, she developed a sudden and unexplainable passion for photography, creating pictures filled with fantasy, colour, sadness and longing as a form of personal escape through the portal of her camera.
By regressing to the ‘safe’ memories of when her mother used to read to her as a child, Kirsty spent months handcrafting scenes inspired by the faded fairy tale illustrations of the books they once shared, tinged with her newfound spiritual connection with nature and adult grief. Nothing is a recreation of a character that already exists, these were Kirsty’s own visions used as a mirror to express her emotional state of mind in the real world. It became a way to block out the ghosts of the hospital, a powerful therapy and ultimately a way of stepping into a more beautiful existence than her actual reality.