Long Way Back to Nowhere: New Works from the Holy Land

Nick Waplington, Icon ( self portrait Jesus) No. 250765 4 oil on canvas

“The West Bank is home to two separate communities that don’t like each other and wish the other would go away,” says artist Nick Waplington, “It’s out of this forced relationship that the work I’ve made has come about”.

Waplington, who has been working out of a studio in Hackney Wick since 1999 has, for the past four years, been living in the West Bank, working among the communities there. This month sees the opening of his exhibition, Long Way Back to Nowhere: New Works from the Holy Land.

“When I went out there I decided that it was year zero for me,” says Waplington. “I decided to forget everything I’d made before and start again”.

When he arrived in the West Bank, Waplington decided to work in ways he had never experimented with before, so this exhibition – the first since he returned to the UK earlier this year – is essentially a retrospective of his life’s work to date.

“Every day you’re seeing things or hearing or experiencing things that are extremely disturbing,” he says. “You can’t not be affected.” It is this total immersion in the West Bank that led to the works making up this exhibition.

The water heater/racing car pieces are particularly interesting. Waplington has created works from mundane domestic appliances that convey the story of life in the West Bank. Waplington explains that every household has one of these heaters, and after a few years of use, once the element becomes calcified and they no longer work, they are discarded in the street. Israeli soldiers use them as targets, peppering them with bullet holes, while Palestinian fighters sometimes pack them with explosives which take out Israeli tanks that happen to rumble over them.

“I took one home and I put it in my garden,” says Waplington. “Then I would see more and put them in my garden and then I realised I had the beginning of a process.”

Many Palestinians spend their money souping-up cars, and it is this fact that inspired Waplington to turn the heaters into racing cars.

“I found a young guy in a refugee camp who had a car body shop,” explains Waplington. “I would create the designs and he would turn them into racing cars for me.” This process has created works with real physicality that are inextricably linked to both the people and the politics of the West Bank.

Other works in the exhibition are also very powerful, notably the ‘Best Wank’ sign, a critique of American foreign policy in the Holy Land. The whole collection, which could quite easily have been dour and sombre is actually alive with colour and a treat for the eyes.

Waplington has staged this exhibition at great personal cost. He re-mortgaged his house to bring the collection to London to show it as there was no money to assist him in transporting the pieces.

“I want people here to have an understanding of the West Bank and have an experience that’s beyond what they read in newspapers,” he says.

Long Way Back to Nowhere: New Works from the Holy Land
Until 28 January 2012
See Studio
13 Prince Edward Road
Hackney Wick
E9 5LX