HE has created a train from bricks, a submarine from car tyres, and fashioned the “Big Heids” on the M8.
Now David Mach is to install his latest large work of art in a Glasgow gallery: using five tonnes of Herald and Times newspapers.
A comment on the endless tide of fast-pace news of the modern age, the river of newspapers will appear to crash in and out of the gallery space at Cass Art in Glasgow.
The substantial work begins this week but will take a fortnight to install with the artist also deploying heavy hard-edged boxes that resemble ammunition or military supplies. The artwork, which will resemble a wild torrent of paper, is called Against The Tide, and follows the practice of his best-known work, creating sculptures out of multiple identical objects, such as coat hangers, magazines and matches.
The installation will use the newspapers as it “focuses on the tide of information we receive daily, and the questions this information raises about our contemporary lives. And questions about our sexuality, gender, race, industry, money and politics”.
Mach, 62, originally from Methil in Fife, has revealed sketches for the work but, until it is installed, he will not know exactly what it will look like. “I don’t know how exactly it is going to end up, but the newspapers will cascade from one part of the gallery to the other, so it will be a dynamic sculpture,” he said.
“I have been doing things on a bigger scale, so in comparison, this is a tiddler – but it is five tonnes: we will put it together very slowly and elegantly, newspaper by newspaper.
“You will have the soft, curvy-ness of the newspapers, against the hard edges of the boxes, which are like boxes of ammunition. It will take a couple of weeks to make, it’s a lot of work.”
Mach has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world including London, New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv and Warsaw.
His best known works include Polaris, a submarine made from 6,000 car tyres, the Brick Train near the A66 outside Darlington in the north east of England, and the Big Heids in North Lanarkshire, which overlook the M8, and in 2011 he held a solo show at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh called Precious Light, which was a contemporary reading of the King James Bible, for which he won a Herald Angel.
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