Described as a multi-faceted artist, British fine art photographer Kirsty Mitchell draws on her past careers in fashion design and costume making, to produce images of beguiling dream-like worlds all shot in the ancient woodlands of her home county Surrey. Kirsty describes her approach as ‘Fantasy for Real’ spending months meticulously handcrafting her character’s costumes and props to coincide with the bloom of wild flowers and the seasonal extremes of her local environment. After graduating from six years of study at The London College of Fashion and Ravensbourne College of Art, Kirsty went on to complete internships at the studios of Avant Garde designers, Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan. Her career as a fashion designer continued for over a decade until 2008, where upon Kirsty developed a sudden and deeply emotional passion for photography during the treatment of her mother’s terminal cancer. It was through the lens that Mitchell felt able to channel her grief and process the pain she felt unable to talk about with the people she loved. She describes photography as becoming both an obsession and a therapy. In the summer of 2009 Kirsty embarked on the creation of the Wonderland series, a project intended as a book in her mother’s memory. The international acclaim for this body of work led Mitchell to leave her fashion career behind in 2011 and after a total of 5 intensive years, Wonderland was completed at the end of 2014. A year later, after a number of offers from major publishers, Mitchell decided to launch her own crowdfunding campaign to produce the Wonderland book in order to create a high end publication made from the finest materials possible, printed in Italy. The campaign went on to become the most successfully funded photography book in crowdfunding history, raising more than £334K in just 28 days and was completely sold out within 3 months. The Second Edition was released in the Autumn of 2016 and continued to sell all over the world, with the latest Third Edition having just been released in December 2021