From decommissioned oil rigs to golden falcons, inspiration is renewable

Creative team behind Expo 2020 Dubai and UAE National Day ceremonies developing a spectacular UK summer project

The design for the See Monster oil rig public art installation. Photo: New Substance

When you’re the mastermind who makes the impossible happen, with a series of record-breaking world firsts under your belt, it must be hard to imagine how you can go one better on the next ambitious project.

But fresh from creating a huge globe of the Earth — surrounded by dancing clouds — to form the centrepiece at the opening ceremony of Expo 2020 Dubai, Patrick O’Mahony is facing his toughest challenge yet.

This time, the 39-year-old Yorkshireman is in the midst of rescuing a North Sea oil rig to transform it into an art installation to display how the British weather can be used to create a sustainable future, through wave and wind power.

Whose mad idea was it to attempt to move an oil rig to a British seaside resort? Why, O'Mahony's of course.

“This is one of our craziest, most ambitious ideas,” O'Mahony told The National.

“All our other work has been working with the entertainment industry, this time we are having to get a core product from a totally different industry. It’s never been done.”

But this is the man who managed to create a world-first when he was given just two months to design a giant golden falcon, celebrating the UAE’s emblem, that could be attached to a helicopter and flown around Meydan racetrack to open the Dubai Racing World Cup.

Did it work? Of course it did.

Abu Dhabi helped inspire world's first oil rig art installation

This time, O'Mahony’s team at his company Newsubstance, in Leeds, northern England, wanted to come up with a winning pitch to be part of the UK government’s £120 million ($158.3 million) year-long Unboxed — Creativity in the UK free art initiative.

Unboxed is funding 10 large-scale, public art engagement projects that will show off the UK’s creativity and innovation globally throughout 2022.

With a brief of creating a piece of art to tell a renewables story, O'Mahony and his team knew that they wanted to create a bold idea that would “celebrate the great British weather”.

After days racking their brains, it was finally at the UAE's National Day in Abu Dhabi — where the team were behind the spectacular ceremony — where inspiration struck and See Monster was born.

“We were taking a break, it was a beautiful day with a clear blue sky and we were brainstorming ideas,” he said.

“We knew we wanted to tell the story of the great British weather. The first thing people do in Britain is talk about the weather, it’s part of our identity.

“We wanted to look at the weather and frame it as our renewable future. We like things that are big and physical and living in a digital age we wanted to do something big and ambitious that would bring a smile to people’s faces.

“Then it came to me, sat in one of the world’s oil capitals, what about obtaining an oil rig and transforming a big brutal structure like that?

“I thought wouldn’t it be amazing if we could repurpose it and acknowledge its past and use it to look to the future.”

Their pitch won: the world’s first and only repurposed oil rig, called See Monster, which will be placed on the British seafront and use renewable energy sources to power it, from the sea and wind to the sun.

The 36-metre tall structure will provide a fun educational place focusing on weather, climate change and green technologies and will have a dedicated outreach team to talk about science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.

Where do you find a spare oil rig to turn into a piece of art?

So, where do you start trying to find an oil rig?

“Obviously, the first thought was ‘where do I get an oil rig from? Is it even possible’,” O'Mahony said.

“I found a firm that moves rigs around the world. I rang them up and said 'I know this is a ridiculous question but I want to make an oil rig into an art installation, would you come on board?' No one had ever asked the question before.

“These platforms are recycled rather than reused and when I spoke to tonnes of people in the oil industry they all agreed it was something we should be doing. It was then an issue of trying to find the right platform that was at the end of its life.”

The team sought help from the UK’s capital of oil, the Scottish city of Aberdeen, which is now being transformed into Europe’s renewables capital.

A rig was identified that had been in the North Sea for the past 20 years and was nearing the end of its life.

“The rig would have gone for recycling and we are giving it a new life,” he said.

“We have stripped it of all the pipework and we have the strong framework left. It’s yellow and covered in rust, you can see all the scars on it, you can almost feel its history. Nothing on it is small, the beams are over a metre deep.

“We’re not repainting it, we want people to see it as it is and to be able to see the development phase and it being transformed into something that is economically sustainable.

“The whole ethos is we wanted to take an existing oil rig that’s been out in the North Sea generating energy and show where it has come from and where it can go to. We want to transform it from a massive brutal feature to what it is capable of doing in the future.”

How do you move a giant North Sea oil rig to a seaside resort?

The team has chosen the south-west seaside resort of Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset to place the installation on the site of its former lido, the Tropicana, which in its heyday attracted thousands of visitors, including Hollywood stars Laurel and Hardy.

Recently the venue hosted Banksy’s Dismaland theme park.

The arrival date of the platform is shrouded in secrecy.

But the question has to be asked, how do you transport an entire offshore platform from its North Sea home to the south-west coast of England?

“It’s very big and complicated and the theatre of how it arrives is important,” he said.

“People will be able to see the raw bones of the rig arriving and then over a two-month period it will slowly rehabilitate into a big renewable future.

“We are just working through all the different logistics. It’s like the circus coming to town.”

Once installed the structure will tower above the resort in height and have waterfalls cascading from it transforming the rig into a piece of beauty.

“We want people to have goosebumps over what they see,” he said.

“The journey to the top will be important, we want visitors to be guided up slowly through garden laboratories, solar technologies and wind turbines before reaching the amphitheatre.

“It will be very impressive. There will be places for people to sit at the top so they can take time out and just look out to sea.”

Team creates technical illusions, from flying moons to grass-covered deserts

The Newsubstance team has 18 people in its studio working on the venture and a further 17 creative designers in its workshop.

“My team create the ideas and we sit around the table with our engineers and try to work out what’s physically possible,” he said.

“We do everything in-house so we have our own workshop where we can practise what is and isn’t feasible.

“One of my favourite creations so far has been Dubai Expo 2020. We designed the big centrepiece. We created a globe of the world and it had to come out of a one-and-a-half-metre space in the stage and grow to 11 metres.”

The previous projects include:

Opening Louvre Abu Dhabi with a spectacular falling stars finale in which 6,000 LED lights were placed in the lattice domed roof.

Greening of the Desert display at the 2018 UAE National Day. Here the team created a grass path system using 2,500 tubes containing grass bundles that gradually rose up through the stage to create the ‘greening of the desert’.

UAE’s 48th National Day Here the team designed the flying moon display at Zayed Sports City in Abu Dhabi. They created 12, two-metre wide internally lit moons using shells from acrylic spheres that were hand finished and coated in a vinyl graphic sourced from Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. They created a motorised mechanism to keep each moon in its correct rotational orbit using an electric compass that enabled each moon to transition through a full lunar cycle.

The team are excited at the months ahead working on the See Monster art installation but they are already looking to the future.

“The whole concept of See Monster was wanting to crack the nut and create a blueprint for the future,” O'Mahony said.

“Abu Dhabi and Dubai share our ambition of being the first and being brave and creative to break the boundaries.

“I could see the project moving to Abu Dhabi in the future as they look to a sustainable future. I’d love to be able to take it there in the future and showcase it in the place where the idea was born.”