Hello!

Today I would like to tell you about an artist whose work I quite adore.  Kirsty Mitchell (website here) is an art photographer who, for her Wonderland series, built elaborate set pieces, props, and costumes and utilized the natural beauty of the English woods and countryside to create windows into her Wonderland.

The details are so exquisite and the boundaries between the woods and the Wonderland so carefully blurred, that many of the pieces look like they must be paintings or illustrations, and to understand that she truly realized all of these scenes makes them that much more breath-taking.

I first heard about her series while it was still in the works and she was still putting up new images to her website.  Then, as soon as she started the first run for her Wonderland book, I ordered myself a copy right away so that I could hold all of the beautiful images in my hands, page through them, and ogle over them.  Most of the images are printed twice, once with the framing of the full piece, and once in close up, so you can really revel in the gorgeous details.

You should definitely look through all of her beautiful images for yourself, but here are links to some of my favorites:

• A Listless Dawn
• Euphaeidae (Gossamer Wing)
• An Ocean of Tales, Till the Shores of Home
• The Briar Rose (I’m so very sad that this was one of the few pieces not to get a close up in her book!)
• The Ghost Swift
• The Guidance of Stray Souls
• Gaia’s Promise
• Gammelyn’s Daughter
• The Fade of Fallen Memories (It’s seriously a photograph.  How? and how wonderful.)

Holding her book in my hands, I remember feeling such an acute sense of envy – not for her art, which is entirely hers and entirely wonderful, but for the trick she pulled off in producing it.  She had a world and a vision IN HER HEAD, and she got it out where other people can see it.  That is very much what I want to be able to accomplish with my writing – to show others the worlds in my head – but I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to say I’ve pulled it off as well as Kirsty Mitchell has for hers.

Anyway, last year I decided I’d finally saved up enough money to be allowed to treat myself to a fancy art print, and so I purchased her “Gammelyn’s Daughter” as a birthday present to me.  (And then, some months later, I finally got it framed and hung up at the end of my hallway where it barely fits, but barely fits still means it fits, so we’re good to go.)

This is the first fancy art print I’ve ever owned, and I love so many things about this piece.  I love the sand on her feet.  I love how unapologetically colorful the image is, so fully saturated with pink and purple.  I love the ship she’s holding with its own, oh so delicately contrasting, colors.  I love how the whole thing when I look at it makes me feel sort of adrift.

And while I love this piece, at first I wasn’t sure how I felt about the image cropping, the width of the image in tension with the line of her body running long.  I even considered that, maybe, I might clip the edges in some when I went to get it framed.  (Remember, it barely fits in my hallway, so I wasn’t just being completely barbaric.  And a matboard would have just covered the edges – I wouldn’t have cut them!)

But then the print arrived, and I was able to really take the image in for the full impact.  And I realized that it’s really quite perfect the way it is.  She’s laying in a field, and yet somehow the framing puts me in mind of one of those nautical paintings of a ship at sea.  It’s one more element of the entire meaning of the piece and really contributes to that feeling of drifting, to that feeling that you are entirely somewhere else.

And, as an aside, I find it so interesting that that’s something else that you can really get from looking at the Wonderland book, also, with its images printed in two sizes – the fact that the size of the image you’re looking at, how well you can take in the image’s boundaries as it was intended, or whether you have to sort of scroll up and down a little bit, has a big impact on what you get from each piece.  The images I linked above as favorites of mine are listed based on my viewing them both on my computer screen and as they appear in the book.  But I’m pretty sure I’d have at least a few other favorites if I were able to view them in a gallery, where they’re of a size to just completely visually engulf you.

I’m so curious to see what Kirsty Mitchell’s next project will be like.  And I wish I knew about more artists who use photography to fuse realistic and fantastical elements. I’m sure there are probably many others.  The only other example I actually know about though (and I don’t know the artist, dang it!) is in the Uma Thurman film, Where the Heart Is, in which her character’s sister paints beautiful murals and then blends the people into them.

These sorts of technique’s, to me at least, seem to make the ideas within the images almost touchable.  Conjured beauty, so close to being truly manifest.