Like many crafters, David Mach, an art-degreed, professional sculptor, has a deep obsession with repurposing everyday stuff. He’s created major works out of wire coat hangers, safety matches, and old magazines, exploring the tension between high-brow art and quotidian, throwaway materials. He once built a life-sized nuclear submarine out of castoff car tires. His coat hanger sculptures must be seen to be believed, and you’ll be amazed at the curves he coaxes from square Scrabble tiles in his nine-foot-tall nude, Myslexic.
Though they seemingly sprang to life from a colossal junk drawer, Mach’s sculptures are anything but thrown together. “They’re made traditionally,” he explains, “first modeled in clay, molded, then cast in Scrabble pieces, dominoes, and such.”
Isn’t that a huge pain in the neck? “I have an excellent assistant, Patrick Milne, who actually glued all of the Scrabble pieces together in the mold.” It pays to be boss.
Mach made his name in the 1980s with his art installations in which massive objects — pianos,
cement mixers, cars and trucks — are engulfed in voluptuous waves of old magazines and newspapers.
Of his latest series of oversized nudes, Mach says, “All of the figures get a good reaction from the public, who are amazed that it’s possible to use such materials to make art.”
When he’s not rollerblading, skiing, or windsurf-ing, Mach can be found in his southeast London studio working on new sculptures, extravagant photo-collages (all those leftover magazines), and proposals for public artworks around Europe.
He recently was named Professor of Inspiration and Discovery (“a newly created position and a helluva title”) at Dundee University in his native Scotland, where he has proposed a huge female figure leaning casually over a campus science building, like a dean keeping an eye on her scholars. A 60-foot-tall nude dean, made of an everyday material to be announced.
—Keith Hammond
>> Scrabble Nude: davidmach.com
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