The Maroon Dress
The Maroon Travelling Dress has been on a long journey though time and space that started in the United States in 2018. The dress has since traveled to Australia, Scotland, England, Italy, Canada and finally home again to the United States. Originally there were 6 or 7 in the Maroon Travelling Dress group but the daily pressures and strains of family life (which we can all relate to!) complicated its journey, and the group shrunk to 4. We persevered however, and at long last this is the story of our Maroon Travelling Dress.
I received the dress in the mail and thought ‘Oh golly, what am I going to do with this?? My daughter was being cheeky and started prancing around the house in it so I thought mmm, this could work after all.
I had noticed an eroded paddock on the highway not far from the river a little while ago. It was a windy, very overcast day. I grabbed her dad's hat as I thought that something to keep her hands busy would help as she doesn't really love being in front of the camera. We were first stopped at an abandoned bus by the side of the road, then an open dirt road and eventually the open paddock that I had been busting to use. The erosion is beautiful, big gully's, such amazing landscape. The wind blew her hat off eventually never to be seen again and I felt like this really added an extra element to such a beautiful windy afternoon.
The dress arrived during a seemingly endless winter and I knew I wanted to take it outdoors. For my first, one and only attempt at outdoor self-portraits I wanted to depict vulnerability while also feeling brave, and rebellious. I wore the dress out onto a near by trail and into a local farm field. Barefooted into the snow….
I knew where I was heading with the dress before it even arrived with me. Our favorite place, where we got married and spend our family holidays every year, Glentruim Estate in the heart of the Scottish Highlands. I wanted shots at the beautiful viewpoint and got lucky with the wind giving the dress a bit of movement too. I took my sister and our 2 littlest girls along for the day out, it was 2 hrs drive north for us but so worth it, we packed ourselves a picnic, sat in the sun at the viewpoint and with and bit of help from the sister we captured these shots together. The ones of me alone were all self portraits, I had intended taking them all myself using the canon connect app but the sun was so bright on the day I couldn’t see my phone screen at all so there was a little help from my sister to get the focus right. The one of me and the girls walking back through the trees, one of our favorite walks to take on the estate was my sister capturing it for me, always handy to have a photographer sister on hand to help out.
The dress arrived a few days before I was due to meet my sister in Florence for a rare girls weekend without the children. It was immediately obvious that the maroon dress would be coming with me. I didn’t hesitate for a second to pack the dress and take it on a journey to this beautiful ancient city. We stayed in a hotel in the center of Florence that radiated charm and centuries of long forgotten tales. As luck would have it, my hotel room was exact shade of red as the maroon dress. The two synchronized perfectly.
This the Florentine adventure of the Maroon Dress told though a series of self portrait studies.