For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Katinka Bock has created a series of eight wearable sculptures.
The exhibition’s title refers to the two brands of sewing machines, Churchill and Typical, which the artist dismantled in order to select elements that
could, as they are and thanks to their various intrinsic qualities of form, construction, and weight, adorn the body.
Usually, the sewing machine is the tool used to make clothing and objects intended to adorn the body.
Here, its function is transformed: it sheds its role as an instrument to become an ornament in its own right. Its components are used directly to adorn the hands, neck, ears, or chest, blurring the line between tool, jewelry, and body.
These extracted elements—clearly identifiable in our memories of quasi-industrial archaeology—have not changed in size, and yet isolating them
from one another and placing them on the body in a precise position gives them an entirely different scale, a certain monumentality. Meanwhile, the change in materials, the transition from steel to gold and silver, definitively propels them into the realm of the precious.