Douglas White scavenges the detritus of society and transforms it into monumental sculptures. Nick Hackworth meets a modern-day shaman.

It's hard to know what you'd make of Douglas White's sculpture if you stumbled across it by accident. Not a likely eventuality of course, unless you make a habit of wandering through a very particular stretch of rainforest in northern Belize, the tiny Central American state and former British colony that lies sandwiched between Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea. But if you did happen to venture through said jungle, and walked beneath the tall tropical trees and pushed past the creepers and vines, avoiding the exotic and occasionally deadly fauna, you might find yourself in a small clearing staring at a 16-foot palm tree made from blown-out lorry tyres.

If you looked up at the giant tree, you would see the fat, rubber fronds spilling out from its trunk, imbuing the object with a weird vitality, indicating that this new species was, if anything, flourishing in happy competition with its organic cousins. Perhaps, you might incorrectly surmise, that in preparation for the forthcoming ecological apocalypse of rising global temperatures, Gaia was experimenting with new, hardy and idiot-proof materials. Unsurprisingly, this tree is a work of art. The palm is one of the most significant works to date by recent Royal College of Art graduate, Douglas White, 27, who hails originally from Croydon and planted his palm at the invitation of an art-loving landowner, who is in the process of turning his patch of Belize into what will be one of the world's most oddly located sculpture parks.

"The first thing that really caught my eye, among this lush green landscape, were these remnants of lorry tyres lying everywhere," explains White, sitting in his Hackney studio. "They were so frail and strange-looking that they looked like dead birds or roadkill. I felt I had to do something with them, but I still didn't know what, as I had only just come across them and still wasn't sure how I would collect them. I had a month out there, but by week two I realised I had to do this. So, I got a taxi driver to help me collect the first bunch. He thought I was a lunatic but in the end he got really into it. We had the tyres wrapped around the car, in one window and out the other, and another trailing out of the boot."

When he arrived back in the UK, a small version of his Belizean palm earned White a place on the shortlist for the Jerwood Sculpture prize, at which Wilfred Cass, founder of the prestigious Goodwood Sculpture Park, saw the palm. And so, a second Icarus Palm sprouted in the genteel surroundings of the English countryside, starting a chain of events that mimicked those past colonial expeditions to the Caribbean Sea to bring back rubber to satisfy the British domestic market.

As with previous works, the Icarus Palm (Belize) was based on White's affinity with discarded objects, both natural and manmade, and his compulsion to either reframe them or transform them into something new and altogether more peculiar. Playing out the scenario of a stranger coming across the palm in the forest, White suggests that it could be mistaken for one of the more unusual relics of the pseudo-religious cargo cults that once flourished in the more remote parts of Melanesia in the south-western Pacific. In blissful ignorance of the tedious reality of the processes of capitalist production and consumption, the Melanesian islanders believed that the attractive manufactured goods - "cargo" - that white Westerners brought with them were in fact theirs by divine right. These magical objects were surely created by ancestral spirits, and were meant as a gift for their people instead of being unnaturally seized by the usurping whites.

The most famous instances of cargo cult activity came about when islanders who had been innocently caught up in the battle for the Pacific during World War II, mourned the sudden cessation of contact with the developed world that came with the end of hostilities. No more sudden boatloads of invading soldiers, or airdropped crates full of tinned food, tents and other accoutrements of luxurious Western-style survival. In a bid to attract the strange foreigners and their shiny wares back, some islanders took to copying what they assumed were the elaborate summoning rituals used by the Westerners. Patches of forest were cleared to make primitive runways, next to which they built control towers to be occupied by locals vainly nursing bamboo radios while wearing headphones made of coconuts halves. Some stories, though they may be apocryphal, tell that, at least once or twice, small planes passing over such pseudo-runways, perhaps confused by failing light or perhaps in dire need, attempted to land, only to discover that the locals had, in their ignorance, omitted to remove tree stumps and other obstacles from the landing-strip. Thus, thanks to the serendipitous but perverse machinations of the world, some cargo cults actually succeeded in summoning their gods (and cargo). As well as being fascinating, the anecdote is also instructive. Is the tragi-comic figure of a Pacific islander constructing his wooden, non-electrical and spectacularly non-functioning radio not reflected as a spiritual relative of the artist? After all, isn't the image and idea of art more powerful than its reality? Aren't most artworks in fact objects that promise to summon gods and divine concepts that prove to be somewhat more elusive than Western colonialists - concepts such as beauty, truth and revolution?

What gods are summoned by White's work? And would we want to meet them? "Certainly, I'm indirectly influenced by Duchamp and others like him because they create a foundation to make this sort of work somehow valid," says White. "But that's not to say that I wouldn't be doing this stuff now if it wasn't art. When I was a kid, I wanted to run a junk shop... so maybe I'm deeply attracted to weird objects - art or no art. Also, that tradition of the conceptual readymade... that kind of work refutes the spiritual dimension that these things can have, and I actually want these objects to mean something more than their constituent parts." White's work is more intuitive, its aims more ambiguous, the product of a strange aesthetic and intellectual sensibility.

Such talent has also brought White fame, most notably a recent splash in local London paper Wandsworth and Putney Guardian that read, "The £8,500 work of art that is a load of rubbish" - the headline for an article on White's recent monumental work Counsel. As the story reveals, one evening, on his way home from the Royal College of Art's sculpture studio in Battersea, White spotted two burnt-out glass recycling bins on the edge of a local council estate. The intense heat of the fire that had fed on the toxic chemical components had melted the bins into forms that caught White's eye. Translated into a gallery context, the bins take on the mantel of a 21st century version of the bronze cast by Henry Moore and Lynn Chadwick in the 1950s. The dark, yawning forms have an air that is at once regal and slightly sinister - the melted plastic has become like shrouds or heavy robes of state. The sculpture also has an £8,500 price tag, which did more for the tabloid imagination than any creatively melted plastic.

What the Wandsworth and Putney Guardian's intrepid reporter failed to notice, however, was that in a turn of conceptual brilliance that puts anything Duchamp ever did in the shade, White succeeded in multiplying the value and function of the melted bins while at the same time redeeming them so that they remained true to the spirit of their original purpose. After all, the burnt recycling bins, created, quite possibly, at vast environmental cost in some hellish factory by Bangladeshi school children, had themselves become detritus, destined to become merely a strangely large element in the cornucopia of rubbish dumped into landfills every year. Instead, in the ultimate act of recycling, White reframed them as art, thus achieving a glorious vindication of art's ability to transform the mundane and discarded into totems of cultural value. It is work that, against the odds, casts White in one of the more traditional moulds of artist as shaman - a figure who, with a curious eye and mind, teases out hidden meaning and power from the detritus of the everyday world.

Article by Nick Hackworth, first published in the June edition
of Dazed and Confused magazine.