Colourful, creative and often controversial, David Mach is undoubtedly one of the UK's leading contemporary artists and sculptors.
Born in Methil, Fife in 1956, David studied Fine Art in Dundee at the Duncan Jordanstone College of Art from 1974-79. His experience at art school had a huge impact on him, and during his years at Dundee Mach experimented with many of the techniques he has continued to develop to this day. He is remembered by Jake Kempsell, the current Head of Sculpture at Dundee, as being 'a tall languid character who always seemed to move very slowly but who produced a huge amount of very inventive material'.
By his Degree Show in 1979 the characteristics of what would become the 'David Mach' style were already evident - the fascination with massive scale and the use of labour intensive, painstaking techniques, combined with humour and huge imagination. The work he produced for his Degree Show is typical of this, consisting as it did of a massive leaf carpet suspended in the air over Camperdown Park, where thousands and thousands of beech leaves were individually woven into a 15 metre length of chicken wire. After graduating Mach was awarded a place at the Royal College of Art in London and emerged in 1982 with a Masters Degree. In 1998 he was made a fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts.
The concept of Mass Production has been very influential on Mach's work throughout his career. The visual impact of thousands of elements repeated upon themselves fascinates him and shows the influence of student summer holidays spent working at a bottling plant in Leven.
As Mach says,
"Mass production processes had their effect on me. You'd be seeing thousands of bottles pass before your eyes every day. I loved the extravagance of that mass production thing."
An endless range of objects have subsequently formed the raw material for Mach's sculptures ranging from magazines, tires, storage containers, bricks and match heads. Over the years Mach has produced a staggering output and range of major art works including the Brick Train at Darlington (1997), the massive over-scaled sumo wrestlers – It Takes Two – on the Circular Quays in Sydney (1997), the three Big Heids sited off the M8 (1999), and National Portrait – a monumental collage
commissioned for the Millennium Dome (2000) representing the cultural identity of the UK today.
