Sacred and banal meet in major exhibition on world famous Bible

People who visit David Mach’s extraordinary exhibition, Precious Light in the Arts Festival Gallery at Galway Shopping Centre can expect to get a whole new insight on uses for the humble matchstick. The same goes for wire clothes hangers and magazines.

It is from these ordinary materials that the Scottish artist has created this major show, which is inspired by the King James Bible, the most famous and influential book in the English language.

There are several giant crucifixion sculptures, made of coat hangers and steel, while matchsticks have been used to create heads of Jesus Christ and the devil. And there is a series of large scale collages depicting major biblical stories.

Through the centuries artists have been inspired by the bible, but in David’s case, it came about by accident.

The idea was first put in his head by a friend in the early 2000s and he thought about creating this show for a good six years before starting to work on it seriously.

“I put forward all the arguments why I shouldn’t. I told myself I didn’t have enough staff, it’d take too long, it’d be too expensive . . . but my work was kind of taking me there.”

So when David found out in 2008 that the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible was coming up in 2011, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

He had been making collages since he was a child, but in the years before this show came about, the work “was getting more frenzied and epic”, he explains during a break from hanging the exhibition in Galway. He’s having a quick lunch of chicken nuggets and chips, more for fuel than for pleasure and he’s fired up with energy as he explains the background to Precious Light, which cost over a million pounds to make.

“It’s not just about the Bible, it’s also about contemporary living,” he explains. “You turn on the television and there is famine, disaster, killings, mayhem and lust – it’s in your face all the time and you get sick of it.”

Many of pictures in this exhibition explore these themes and while there are echoes of past masters, the work is totally modern. In more than 30 enormous collages David interprets biblical stories such as Adam and Eve, the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and the Plague of Frogs. He has created these scenes against well-known landmarks in cities such as Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Athens, Paris and Tokyo – some of places the Kings James Bible has reached.

“The King James Bible is the only bible I’ve ever had any experience of, but I’m not a bible scholar,” he says. For him, creating this work was about “using my eyes, my heart, my feelings and my thoughts”, to portray stories which are timeless.

“You listen to the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, and there is the King James Bible in their work. We use expressions from it every day.”Collecting the material for Precious Light and then sorting it and figuring how to use it took him “a good five years”.

“For two or three years I’ve had 30 people working on the show, making the heads, the collages and so on. Nobody funded it, so I was working harder than I’ve ever done.”

Although he has teams of people working for him in several different studios, David is never far away, keeping a close control on how the magnificently detailed collages are being assembled.  

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.