David Mach thinks big. Take his proposal for the M8 motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh which, he admitted in an interview "got a bit out of hand." What he proposed was creating a series of huge sculptures, including massive pyramids ("much bigger" than the Egyptian ones) built from thousands of shipping containers stacked like building blocks, and a "Tartan Army" of 10,000 10foot tall kilt-wearing warriors, led by a sculpted Sean Connery. In all, a kind of Scottish Monument Valley or Valley of the Kings except that, as he noted, it being Lanarkshire and not Egypt "the weather would be crap".
It may sound like whimsy or megalomania but, if you are at all familiar with Mach's prodigious CV, you realise that, a: he's serious and b: he could do it. He established his reputation in the 1980s with a series of increasingly ambitious sculptures and installations like 1983's Polaris, a life-size representation of the nuclear-powered submarine made from tyres, at London's Hayward Gallery. His staple medium is the mass produced multiple object, from tyres to coat hangers, bricks to Sindy dolls and, most famously, newspapers and magazines.
These he uses in their hundreds and thousands, and he uses them as fully-fledged media, not as cultural quotations.
As a raw material, he found, magazines "had their own energy, their own flow". Like a weaver mixing yarns, he uses them brilliantly, with incredible attentiveness to details of pattern and colour, building them into huge, billowing vortices that, like floods, fires or avalanches, capture and consume all manner of objects in their path, from cars to grand pianos, sofas and domestic bric-a-brac to animals, paintings to architectural fragments. Apart from the spectacular impact of the pieces in themselves, there is this exceptionally powerful image of a society swept along on a tide of consumerism.
Yet despite the strand of cultural commentary in his work, he is not classifiable as a conservationist or an apostle of recycling. He points out that the things he uses are not waste - they may be surplus to requirements, but they are pristine manufactured objects. In Kilkenny to organise the creation of four vast newspaper columns - as in fully fledged classical architectural columns - which, with his installation Trophy Room and a dazzling wire coat hanger bust, Likeness Guaranteed (a pun on the hangers' resemblance to a sculptor's pointing machine), will form his contribution to Kilkenny Arts Festival, he points out that his work is exceptionally labour intensive.
You feel he positively relishes the drama of working in difficult circumstances to tight deadlines. His hands and clothes blackened with newsprint, he was directing 12 art students who are currently working full-time on the columns, together with two longtime assistants, Patrick and Simon. Yet he is not addicted to huge scale. What counts, for him, is the challenge of coming up with an idea. The smallest work he's made was for the ashtray of a Hillman Imp - "a miniature Greek temple", built from model car tyres. He used the same motif, built with real tyres, atop a mountain of shipping containers, on the docks in Edinburgh in 1994.
He was born in Methil, in Fife, on the Firth of Forth in 1956. His father is Polish (and was a miner) and his mother, Scottish. "I grew up 10 miles from the seaside. It was really beautiful country, you had everything there, but it was also hugely industrialised - there was room for both. Right next to us was a brickworks. I went to bed with the noise of the machinery and woke up to it. There was a slag heap and there was the docks, where they made these huge oil platforms, and of course there were the mines." He worked in factories during the school holidays, and thinks this had an effect on his work.
OF COURSE, that Britain hardly exists any more. "It's all gone. The brickworks was blown up. All the coal mines have closed. The oil platform business is still going, but it's always on a knife edge." He is very much against the notion, sometimes mooted, that his works are in some sense monuments to this vanished industrialised world. "I feel very strongly that they're not memorials. One of my pet hates are those sculptural plaques that are presented as art in the community, telling you there used to be a mine here. It's so condescending. You're into this virtual reality world of theme-park stuff about industrial heritage . . . I'd like to think what I do isn't about that at all. I'd like to think what I do might encourage something else to happen, might stimulate people to do something more . . ."
He was always drawn to using multiple objects. "When you work in factories you notice that they make things in thousands, in millions. They never say `well let's make this one really great thing'. It's `how can we make a million of these and flog 'em?'. When I made the piece in Darlington (a life-size locomotive) I used brick. It never occurred to me to ask why brick? But I can still hear the rumble of the big wheels in the brickworks in my head, and that had to have something to do with it."
His work is exhaustively detailed, complex and protracted in execution, which he thinks is a result of his "Scottish Calvinist background": "You're supposed to work. I'm against the kind of art where someone wanders onto a stage and farts and everyone is supposed to applaud. That's not art. I think people are right to question it. You have to question it. I'm all for the work thing. I'm not saying you can't make great art in a few minutes but I certainly haven't found a way to do it yet and I'm just as suspicious about art and artists as anyone."
The Trophy Room, with its aura of exclusivity, could be read as an allegory of the art world. Originally created for Warsaw in 1993, it is fitted out like a wood-panelled billiard room in a gentleman's club, but the animal heads lining the walls all proffer consumer durables, including an elephant with a fridge (Feeding Time), a rhino with a piano (Nicely out of Tune), a deer with an exercise machine and so on. It is typically Mach in that it is instantly accessible but also operates on several levels, providing a rich vein of imagery.
David Mach's Here to Stay is on display at the Advance Factory, Loughboy
