ABSTRACT
Sculptural installation artist, using ready-made objects. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (1974-9) and the RCA (1979-82). His sculptural installations have used familiar consumer products, such as bottles, books, tyres and other discarded manufactured objects. In 1981, his first major installation was Silver Cloud III, modelling a Rolls-Royce from second-hand books. Polaris (1983) was a large-scale representation of a nuclear submarine constructed of old motorcar tyres: Temple of Tyre (1984, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp) was a parody of the Parthenon made of tyres and containers. Thinking of England (1983) was made of some zooo identical clean HP Sauce bottles arranged in a rectangle on the floor, with red and blue water strategically filling some of the bottles, creating the suggestion of a female figure lying arms and legs spread-eagled and at the same time the design of the Union Jack. David Mach: <italic>Temple of Tyre</italic> 1984. Rubber tyres https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315197876/7cf4e73f-6049-4a39-ba75-439a87ea6e02/content/fig1_13_56.jpg"/> In 1986 he installed Fuel for Fire at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in which a tidal wave of old magazines flooded out from a fireplace to engulf all the diverse domestic objects lying in its path. His 101 Dalmatians (1988, Tate Gallery) consisted of a chaotic mass of furniture, domestic appliances, a bed, a carpet and a television set, with a pack of ornamental plaster dogs swarming over and around it. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize (1988). In Warsaw he parodied animal trophy heads in his Trophy Room (1993), in which the animals are in revolt against the role they are supposed to be playing. To the open-air exhibition Sculpture at Goodwood in Sussex he contributed The Garden Urn (1996), laboriously constructed of thousands of wire coathangers which entirely clothe a fibreglass replica of an existing stone urn. His smaller sculptures are usually also made of identical mass-produced units built up to make a whole, as in his 'match head' series of portraits and masks, made from unstruck matches glued together and occasionally fired afterwards.
