Kirsty Mitchell

Described as a multifaceted artist, award winning 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 English landscape surrounding her home. Kirsty describes her approach as ‘Fantasy for Real’ spending months meticulously handcrafting her characters costumes and props to coincide with the bloom of wild flowers, and the seasonal extremes of her local environment. Some pieces have taken up to 5 months to create every element by hand, and over a year to plan. The photographs are entirely real, assembled like mini film sets, and shot first hand on location in all weathers. The series has been documented extensively, with behind the scenes photographs and films to demonstrate this.
After a decade of working as a fashion designer, in 2008 Kirsty returned to her early love of photography and began a new and deeply emotional connection with the medium during the treatment of her mother’s terminal cancer. Following her mothers tragic loss, 9 months later Kirsty immersed herself into what became an unexpected and life changing series entitled ‘Wonderland’; intended as a book in her mother's memory. The sudden internati...

Education: Studied fine art, photography and history of art. Specialised in “Costume for Performance” at The London College of Fashion, gaining a Higher National Diploma with Distinction. Kirsty completed her training at Ravensbourne College of Art, achieving a First Class Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours in ‘Fashion Design and Textiles’ in 2001.
Experience: Interned at the studios of Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan. After graduating Kirsty spent the next decade as a senior designer for a global fashion label specializing in surface decoration and fabric manipulation. In 2008 Kirsty returned to photography and began a new and deeply emotional connection with the medium during the treatment of her mother’s cancer. Following the tragic loss of her mother, Kirsty turned to photography to help deal with her grief and embarked on her now revered 3 year series entitled ‘Wonderland’ created in her mothers memory. The international acclaim for her work led Kirsty to leave her fashion career in 2011 and pursue her future as a fine art photographer. Kirsty currently lives and works in the Surrey countryside in the UK.