off the radar is a socially-engaged public art and sound work which premiered on Saturday 22nd October 2016 as part of the Longbridge Light Festival (LLF), part of the Longbridge Public Art Project (LPAP), a contemporary site-specific art project produced by WERK.
off the radar was co-created with sound artist Anna Schimkat, Year 5 students from St. Columba’s Primary School and performed with support from the West Heath Choir.
In off the radar, the first floor of Marks and Spencer’s multi-storey car park in Longbridge, Birmingham, U.K was transformed to become an abstract inspired skyline. This was in response to the commission brief which asked my collaborators and I to explore to a war theme in response to the British government’s ‘Shadow Scheme’ initiative for the production of aero engines for military production during the second world war.
Through this theme, we creatively explored the idea of transformation (explained in detail later in this Chapter). We added various blue filters into the fluorescent lighting fittings to flood the first floor of the car park with blue sky-inspired colours. To allude to white clouds, we borrowed white coloured cars from a local community of car enthusiasts. Three of the cars were filled with lights and one with poppies to engage with the war theme. The West Heath choir sang a song that I composed in response to a war-themed poem by a Birmingham resident (Pat Baimbridge called When the Lights Went On The choir entered the space as audience members and surreptitiously began to repeat phrases connected to the Longbridge car plant and the function of multi-storey car parks. My collaborators and I responded to a sub-theme of camouflage, interpreting it as transformation, moving from one instance to another.
