David Mach's Wirey Art

This larger-than-life gorilla statue is made of hundreds of recycled coat hangers. The spike-covered sculpture is just one of the unique creations by David Mach who has made an entire collection of coat hanger art projects.

The statues include a portrait of Mach’s brother, an Astronaut, a “Hooker” and “Rabbit Stew!”

“The work is made up from hundreds of standard metal coathangers, welded to each other around a plastic positive later removed, and then silver nickel plated,” Mach says on his site. “What does it cost to send a man into space, to make him walk on the moon? I am fascinated by the effort of that, the science, the brainpower, the sheer physical power of the rockets. Billions of dollars spent over decades, invested in the best minds, and here I am, using the cheapest, throwaway nothing object, a coathanger, to portray that.”

Mach first creates a mold of the basic figurine to act as an outline which he coats in hard plastic. It’s on this plastic form that he attaches the coat hangers.

“When I have ideas I want to make them, and not just some of them, but all of them,” he says on his site. “As a result of that my sculpture covers a multitude of sins. I like to work in as many different materials as possible. It’s no understatement to say I am a materials junkie - jumping from highly-painted realistic cast fibreglass pieces to sculpture with coathangers, to a thatched barn roof laced with fibre-optics to designs for camera obscures (or at least the buildings to house them) and layouts for parks.”“