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[MUSIC]
The trigger for
the way photography changed my life was my mother's diagnosis with cancer.
Photography became my voice when I couldn't speak about
what I was going through.
My name is Kirsty Mitchell.
I'm a fine art photographer from Surrey, in England, and
this is my Flickr moment.
[MUSIC]
My mother was an English teacher.
I always describe her as the Dead Poet Society Teacher.
She wanted to instill a belief in beauty and creativity in children.
She collected all of these extraordinary books of European folklore,
with incredible illustrations.
And, she read to me until actually my early teens.
After she passed away in 2008, I went through an incredibly hard time.
I suffered with depression.
I think when you lose somebody, you need to channel yourself into
something, it's the only way to block out what happened.
And so, I obsessively began creating these pictures
that became the Wonderland series.
The Wonderland series is a visual fable of all these emotions and memories
that linked back to the stories that my mother read to me as a child.
It can take up to five months to create one image.
I create all the costumes, the props, the sets.
They're incredibly detailed.
This costume was made from 240 wooden fans imported from China,
that I had to hand-paint.
It took me two and a half months.
When I started the series, I was working as a fashion designer, and I
certainly had no intention of leaving my job to become a full time artist.
But, it became this undeniable passion that was all I could think about.
I felt I had to make a decision.
Walk away from my career, or
I spend the rest of my life sitting behind a desk wondering what if.
So, I decided to give up my job.
The response has been something that I never expected.
The series has now been covered by the BBC, Vogue,
Harper's Bazaar, and now I'm about to produce the Wonderland book.
One of the bittersweet sides to it is the amount of people that have
contacted me because of their own experiences with grief.
I had people saying that they felt that they
could see no beauty in the world after losing their partner, their child.
And then,
saying that the photographs, it was like someone opening their eyes again.
I lost so much in losing my mother, but
at the same time I have gained so much.
Photography for me is about emotion and human connection.
And, it has given me a way to create new relationships with people, and
to express myself in a manner that I never thought possible.
And, that has been the greatest gift.
[SOUND]