IF CLOUDS WERE MOUNTAINS

Exploring the clouds of Armenia through the grainy lens of expired 35mm film and the tactile weight of quilting. This series uses digital printing and freehand embroidery to transform fleeting atmospheric moments into a physical relief map of the Colombian landscape.

I once again found myself back in the UK after a trip to Colombia in the summer of 2025 to see family and friends, with luggage full of undeveloped film, specifically from the clouds over Armenia, Quindío.

The city is in the heart of the coffee region, and the whole area is nestled in a beautiful valley in the mountains. I spent a good chunk of time on top of my in-laws’ apartment building capturing the clouds.

I used my Pentax ME Super and a roll of 35mm film that actually expired back in 2006, which is a risk because until you get the images back from the lab, you really have no way of knowing if the film captured anything at all.

There’s something so satisfying about the fact that this film sat in a box somewhere for twenty years, just waiting to capture the light and the clouds. As the film was so old, the colours shifted in unpredictable ways, and the grain is heavy, making the images look almost like paintings. The tangibility of these images makes them so interesting to look at, and combined with the various 'inperfections' of the expired film they make for a lovely series of photographs. The physical spots and marks on the frames are maybe my favourite part of the images, and it's one of the reasons I love working with film cameras in general, as you never really know what you are going to get.

The tactile, "imperfect" feeling started inspiring my work and processes in the studio. Since getting back in July of 2025, I’ve been learning how to quilt and getting to grips with my sewing machine, and it’s become this massive outlet for all the textures I saw in Colombia and a whole new way of working.

I started using digital printing on fabric to pull some of those grainy film textures directly onto the cloth. From there, I decided to layer things up. I wanted to use a combination of Freehand embroidery and quilting, adding some paint to the surface to pick out some of the more vivid light and lines that caught my eye in the images.

I soon realised that the lines and the texture created by the free motion embroidery and the quilting were making the clouds look more like a relief map of the surrounding mountains, which was a lovely combination and tribute to the landscape. Hence the name of the series, 'If Clouds Were Mountains'.

I'm drawn to quilting for the same reason I loved the images from the 20-year-old film: the tactile nature of it.

Whether it’s a chemical spot on a film negative or an imperfect hand-stitched line, those marks tell the story of the trip better than any smartphone photo. It’s been a bit of a learning curve (quilting is way more mathematical than I anticipated!), but seeing the clouds above Quindío turn into a physical, textured map of thread and paint has been really fun to create.