David Mackay Harrison

David Mackay Harrison
Sculptor

David Mackay Harrison starts with a body, not an idea. working from live models, building the figure first in clay, reworking it until the weight and line feel right, then casting it in bronze by the lost wax method. The result is solid metal built to move: a pointed foot mid step, a figure stretching out of sleep, a body balanced on one leg. Holding that kind of motion in cast bronze is the hard part. It is what David has spent a career on.

His subject is almost always the female nude, occasionally an animal, elephants and a large rhino among them. David works representationally. No abstraction, no hidden meaning to decode, just a body observed closely and rendered with precision. It is a direct kind of ambition, closer to craft than concept, and it has kept collectors and dealers coming back for decades.

Harrison initially worked in agriculture - until a knee injury during a tractor demonstration put him in hospital for four months. He spent that time drawing. Art stayed a hobby until 1968, when he left the machinery trade, travelled and painted around Australia for five years, and gradually turned to sculpture. He opened his own gallery in Ballina in 1978, bought a foundry in Brisbane in 1999, and later set up Bronz-Worx at East Ballina to run the whole process himself, from clay model to finished cast.