When Italian artist Francesca Colussi Cramer discovered a small vintage shop near her house in North Wales, she started creating embroidery patterns and grids onto old photographs.
She was captivated with the nostalgic feel of the shop’s old pictures and postcards and began adding threads to breathe new life to the original work. Some of her additions are like abstract patchwork quilts, while others are layered colors of the subject in the images.
“Adding thread on paper alters an existing surface and creates such a rich texture and contrast with the original image itself,” Cramer told Colossal. “It’s both visual and tactile, and doing it on paper, instead of fabric, comes with challenges and differences that I find more intriguing every day. It is a sort of conversation with the past in the images, like lifting a layer of dust and letting the color through, adding another chapter.”
