It took five seamstresses two weeks to make the dress. Then, two minutes into the shoot, the model said she was cold and wanted to go home.
Growing up, our house was always full of storybooks. I would come home from school and my mother would have some incredible eastern European volume. “Look at this one,” she’d say. “I need to show you.” We’d sit together on the sofa. I’d rest my head on her chest and she’d read to me.
In April 2008, while living in France, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died seven months later. Her decline was so fast that she wasn’t able to come back to England. Her funeral – had it been in the UK – would have been a celebration of her legacy. As a schoolteacher she had inspired so many with literature and imagination. When I got back, I knew I needed to do something.
Nature became a huge comfort and helped me process my grief, which in turn inspired my photography. I found this location, Leith Hill, in Surrey, just as the bluebells were blooming. The colour was exactly as intense as it is in my photograph. They come and go so quickly though, there was no time to actually make a picture there. I had to wait until the following spring.
I knew exactly what I would shoot. I was unable to think of my mother in recent times: this shot was part of a series called Wonderland, a retreat to safer memories, to the stories of my childhood. I collected the books I remembered us reading: The Kingdom Under the Sea by Joan Aiken with Jan Pienkowski’s black ink silhouettes and Laurence Housman’s Moonlight and Fairyland with Pauline Martin’s drawings. While the images, the costumes and the sets were my own creations, those illustrations inspired the mood.
The images were visions I would often spend months bringing to fruition. The Storyteller, as I call this work, is a visiting character, someone austere, not welcoming. Some moments in the project – those times when I was coping – felt hopeful; others were darker, more melancholy.
I had designed the dress for an earlier shoot: it took a team of five seamstresses to make, using hundreds of panels of silk. To save money I overdyed it blue and ripped open the back, to make it seem twice as wide.
A friend’s great-grandmother – who had lived like Miss Havisham – passed away and the family gave me her huge book collection – many tomes rotting, spines broken, handwritten notes and newspaper cuttings stuffed between pages. The model is wearing a necklace I made from prayer books given to her when her husband died in 1923. It was a mark of respect for this woman I would never meet. On her lap is a 250-year-old bible, at her feet are the more dilapidated books. It took us two weeks to stitch and staple the pages into the folds of fabric.
The evening before the shoot we went to pick the bluebells, then spent all night threading them on to the headpiece. The next morning the flowers were wet with rain; by the time we got everything set up it was about 4pm: the scene is entirely real and not manipulated in Photoshop. Two minutes into the shoot, the model said she was cold and wanted to go home.
I looked at my camera – I had only taken 20 frames. I had spent a year planning this, and it was a one-time thing: the bluebells would be gone in a few days, the books were getting wet. It was devastating and I spent the rest of the day with my heart in my mouth, thinking: “Have I got it?”
Losing my mother was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through. I still can’t have any pictures of her in my house, it’s too much. At the same time, life had been all laid out for me, and suddenly I was turned in another direction. And in that process I found a part of myself that I may have never known otherwise. I think of it as my mother’s last gift, a bittersweet gift, a real-life fairytale of sorts.
Kirsty Mitchell’s CV
Born: Maidstone, 1976.
Training: Costume making at London College of Fashion; Fashion Design at Ravensbourne College of Art; internships at Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan.
Influences: Painters, especially the pre-Raphaelites, and illustrators including Pauline Martin, Jan Pienkowski and Kit Williams.
High point: “The success of The Wonderland Book. Several major publishers wanted it, but I decided at the final hour to self-publish. It was a terrifying decision, but the resulting book is one of my greatest achievements.”
Low point: “Thinking I was going to have to sell my wedding dress to make money, when, two months after I quit my job, my husband’s company collapsed and we had nothing: I remember us photographing our clothes in the garden to sell on eBay.”
Top tip: “Be authentic, bare your soul. And be sure that whatever you’re doing is the best that you can do.”