Martin Messier's sewing machines act as a storytelling – itself it's narrative – and Messier's installation brings the sound of them into contemporary time. Absurd and playful, the engines afflict and pitch forwards, backwards, slowly and rhythmically.
In Messier's context the sewing machine is deposited as a functional object. It is 'made useless' and reconstructed as part of an art installation, where textiles are taken away. The machine's value is no longer based on its properties as mechanical seamstress, but as sound generator. Where machinery noise used to be an issue for trade unions in the textile industry, exactly this quality of the machine is turned on its head in Messier's installation. The sounds are not only desired, they are a main point in the work.
Looking back, the sewing machine has been an important object regarding gender issues the past 150 years. On one side the industrialisation of textile production was important for the feminisation of the labour market. In the domestic sphere the sewing machine put the means of production in the hands of consumers, and has in many ways the same emancipatory power such as the computer, the sound recorder and the camera. Still the sewing machine remains as an ambivalent object, to which Messier adds new layers of meaning.
Sewing Machine Orchestra is supported by Bergen City Council, Arts Council Norway and PNEK.