WONG:
Flammable sculptures are now part of the art world, thanks to this artist. Let's look at his ingenious use of matches to build his sculptures.

STORY::
Scotsman David Mach has taken something normally considered a fire hazard and
turned it into art.
Mach uses matchsticks to create his sculptures, sometimes needing thousands of matches to complete one piece.

[David Mach, Matchstick Sculptor]:
"...I like the results a lot, and I love the idea that these are, the matches are like nothing. You know you don't ever, you don't think, about stuff like that. They're just in your life in one way or another."

Creating one of these sculptures is a painstaking process where the matches need to be applied to the mould one at a time.
Mach's been doing this for 26 years but even so they can take many months to create.

[David Mach, Matchstick Sculptor]:
"Actually I was in one of my French classes recently. And I'm meeting people who are not artists and they say to me, 'So what do you do then', 'Oh, I'm a sculptor'. 'Oh really, oh, what kind of things do you use?' 'Oh I use matches.' 'Oh that's nice!,' you know."

To add another twist to this tale, Mach occasionally torches his sculptures -- a spectacle he came across by accident.

[David Mach, Matchstick Sculptor]:
"I mean the first one that I was talking about, was set off on fire actually by the guy who bought it...I went around there, and we both started looking at this thing which was still sort of smoking over here and it looked fantastic."

One of Mach's pieces, a two-foot high sculpture of Rock'n'Roll king Elvis Presley, was previously sold for $36,000 U.S. dollars.