Nick Waplington: Holy landscapes

Scanning the light-dappled hills of the West Bank it's easy to see the differences between illegal Jewish settlements and Palestinian towns and villages. The army checkpoints, the street lights, power supply lines and newly metalled roads all indicate - despite the settler mythology of hardy Hebrews living amid a sea of savage Arabs - comfortable modern living.

The Palestinians around them on the same land enjoy somewhat different arrangements. Their villages and towns are often tumbledown, chaotic and hedged in by checkpoints. Their lives and freedoms truncated by occupation and confiscation, they cannot even use the main roads as equals. On Route 60, the highway that knifes down the West Bank from Jerusalem, settlers are given de facto control of the road - in addition to checkpoints, the absence of traffic lights at entry points from Palestinian towns mean huge queues often form. But although the two communities are engaged in an existential struggle, drive down Route 60 with the 44-year-old British artist Nick Waplington and he points out that they have one thing in common - in a land where there is sun for much of the year, their rooftops are studded with water heaters.

'My idea was simple,' says Waplington as we drive. 'I'd take the Jewish water heaters from settlements and take them to a Palestinian workshop in Abu Dis [on the border of east Jerusalem] and get a guy I knew there to spraypaint them.' Comparatively wealthy, the settlers often throw away faulty equipment. Conversely, the Palestinians have been obliged, over the last 44 years, to become experts in recycling and reuse. So, as well as producing strikingly graphic pieces of sculpture, there is a satisfying circularity to Waplington's project that echoes and yet distorts what actually happens on the West Bank. It also contrives to produce something unique - no one else I'm aware of is bringing the settlers and the Palestinians together as artistic collaborators.

Waplington first came to public notice with 'Living Room' (1991), photographic portraits and landscapes set on a Nottingham council estate that arguably set the stylistic template for Shane Meadows's films. He was briefly involved with the YBAs, shared studio space with the Chapman Brothers, became friendly with Tracey Emin and worked with Alexander McQueen. Then, in 2007, he stopped. 'I cut with all galleries, walked away from all that. Around the time of the [financial] crashes,
I started to realise that I didn't fit with the modus operandi of the art world. At art school in the 1980s I thought I'd have to go on to be an art teacher, I never dreamed of living a lavish life making art for oligarchs from the ex-Soviet Union, even if there is a historical precedent in Russians coming over to Paris in the late nineteenth century to buy stuff. Not that I wouldn't love an oligarch to come round [to my studio] and buy everything.'

Feeling that his personal and creative lives had stagnated in London he looked for what he calls a 'year zero' moment. 'I wanted to stop and reconsider everything, to get away from preconceptions.' The timely invitation by French photographer Frederic Brenner to participate in a project in Israel that came with funding and accommodation was that moment. The only preconception Waplington had about Israel or Jewishness was the discovery when he was 18 that his father - a scientist in the nuclear industry - was not his biological parent. His real father was a Jewish businessman whom he has never met. 'My father had Victorian style rules and one was “we don't do art in this family.” When I was young it was inconceivable that I ever would be able to be an artist.'

But, as his first London show in almost five years makes clear, he triumphantly is an artist. Beside the water heaters, other new works include faux-naive portraits inspired by Christian iconography at St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai as well as a simulation of the insect from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' arranged from settlement waste pipes - it is important to remember that playfulness is an essential Waplington ingredient or, if it wasn't, it certainly is now. A West Bank sign is reworked as Best Wank, which is both a joke and a jibe as he left it outside the American embassy in Tel Aviv, a small but discomforting comment on the US's apparently purblind view of the Palestinian dilemma (eventually the Americans asked for it to be moved).

Finally there are big abstract oils that re-configure the blighted Palestine landscape as a wild explosion of colour, only patches of grey referencing the building that threatens to continue until the hills are covered. One senses that it is in the landscapes that Waplinton's delight in his new-found freedom is most manifest. The heaters are constrained objects, taut with meanings and implication; the oils are urgent bursting attempts to catch the colour and depth of rock-scattered slopes that, rather than being barren, burst with wildflowers as we drive past, flickering with the shadows of winter clouds that scud in from the Mediterranean. 'It has been a struggle,' Waplington says. 'But now, after 30 years and at this grand old age, I'm doing what the fuck I want to do - I'm actually getting somewhere.'