'It's a weird, bizarre, dangerous world'

It's almost 20 years since David Mach grabbed headlines with a submarine made of tyres. He tells Elisabeth Mahoney why he's still making waves

Absent-mindedly puffing on a cigar in the eccentric chaos of his south London studio, while the soundtrack to Betty Blue blasts out on a stereo, the artist David Mach tries to remember which pieces of his work are going to Glasgow for his latest exhibition. It's tricky, you see, because he's also working on a new London show, public art projects in France, Holland and Ipswich, and exhibitions in Milan and Turin. And that's just the confirmed projects; ask him about other ideas he's toying with and days could pass in the answering.

He takes another drag, looks at the carnival of items lying around him for some inspiration. A dust-gathering tangle of half-finished sculptures, bunches of artificial flowers and box files crammed full of images for collage projects somehow jogs his memory. "We'll be using 50,000 tonnes of the Glasgow Herald, some wrecked cars, a massive sculpture of a woman diving through two floors of the gallery, three kinds of collage, spacemen, coat-hanger figures, fire eaters, a gnome installation, a grizzly bear holding two stone cutters and, oh yeah, a selection of match-heads."

Talking to the Scottish artist is unnervingly like viewing his work, whether it's the life-sized Rolls Royce he once made out of books, the 55m-long Polaris submarine constructed from 600 rubber tyres (notoriously set on fire and destroyed by a mentally ill spectator who died in the flames), the 78m-long photomontage of Britain produced for the Dome using more than 250,000 photographs, or Big Heids, the monumental Wicker-Man-meets-socialist-realism sculpture on the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Accretion and large scale have long characterised his startling public art projects (road safety organisations, fearing that drivers might swerve off the road, issued warnings on the day the Heids were unveiled), just like his gallery installations, which use thousands of magazines, hundreds of postcards, more "stuff" (a word Mach reaches for time and again to describe what he makes) than you're likely to have seen in an exhibition space before.

Conversation is the same: Mach talks in sentences that he extends with only the slightest attention to syntax, and the mood is one of persistent, humorous bombardment and provocation. Given the eclectic list of exhibits for the Glasgow show, I ask him what, other than size and audacity, underpins his work. His answer makes me feel the way I always feel in front of his work - dwarfed, drawn in, but firmly kept at arm's length by the sheer extent of the project.

"There are concerns that lace everything together," he explains. "I'm obsessed with the idea of individuality, especially in our mad, weird, bizarre, dangerous and truly fucked-up world, and with all the pressures and nonsense we all have to go through every day. I'm obsessed with people, how they survive the muck that life chucks at them. My inspirations come from everywhere. I turn a corner in the car and see something out of the corner of my eye, somebody says something, I hear something on the radio, see something on a billboard, get a message on my phone, talk to a guy who's trying to sell me double-glazing - it's just a relentless barrage of stuff which we have to pick our way through, wrestle with and, if we can, get in a half-nelson."

The other Mach trademarks, he adds, include "a ridiculous number of parts and operations" plus a "robust" quality that he loves. "It's all a bit fuck-you," he cackles. But so is his attitude to almost everything.

He's also a committed critic of the left, from New Labour ("appalling") to the role of the trade unions in the demise of the mining industry in the Fife town of Methil, where he grew up. "The union leaders did as much to destroy the mining community as Thatcher ever did," he says, adding, as if to lighten the tone, that he regularly gets chucked out of his liberal friends' dinner parties. "It's quite something to have these people, the nicest people, shouting, 'Fascist tosser!' at me. The truth is, I've just got no time for party politics, right or left."

It's easy to see where this stance comes from. Mach's father, a Polish miner sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian labour camp by the Soviet authorities, fled to Scotland when he was released after two years. "He had nothing good to say from then on about any politics that were red, or even pink-tinged," Mach recalls. His father's nationality meant a much more cosmopolitan childhood for the artist than his peers enjoyed. "They'd be going to Rothesay for their summer holidays, and we'd be going to the eastern bloc, behind the iron curtain."

What Mach did share with his schoolfriends was the industrial brutality and natural beauty of the landscape in which they lived. He now talks about this duality in the romantic fashion of someone who left his home town more than 20 years ago; Mach moved to London in 1982 after studying art in Dundee. "The thing was the variety of landscapes. I went to sleep every night to sounds coming from the brickworks 100 yards away; things were being made while I lay there. Behind the house was the power station, and up the road were the slagheaps and the docks. But then, if you looked in one direction, there was beautiful countryside, and if you looked the other, there were beautiful beaches and the whole area had this amazing light: pin sharp. It was all a fantastic playground for the mind."

It's hard to fathom what Mach is like outside the studio, not least because he admits to being a workaholic ("non-fucking-stop" is how he describes his working week). I ask if his house is as... creatively dishevelled as his studio and he says, no, it's "normal" - but not minimalist, because he can't abide minimalism. "There's something false about it," he rumbles, "a denial. If I had my choice, I'd have a huge fireplace I could walk into with a roaring fire and baroque gargoyles staring down at me in the lounge."

He did once try a beach holiday but "came home early", preferring to use his work as sanctuary from the stresses of modern life. "It's mad out there, isn't it?" he says with a nod to the door, relighting his cigar. He is sitting under a Scots baronial display of a stag's head and antlers, wildly out of context in a south London industrial centre. Beyond the antlers, a sprig of blue plastic flowers hangs from a pipe 7ft up in the air, next to a half-burned match-head and a group of teddy bears that Mach customised with plastic teeth and tongues he got from a taxidermist before giving them weapons (a food mixer, a blowtorch) to hold. In Mach's studio, just for a moment, "out there" doesn't seem quite so out there after all.

· David Mach is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (0141-229 1996), from March 23 to September 29.

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