2025-11-14 09:15:28
A Turner Prize–nominated artist is attempting to sell a 10-tonne pile of discarded rope for £1 million,
David Shrigley — best known for installing a giant thumb sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth – insists the mountain of knotted, frayed leftovers is both a serious artwork and a pointed joke about the value people place on culture.
The visual artist spent months travelling the UK collecting unwanted rope from wind farms, climbing schools, cruise ships, fishermen and even window cleaners. Much of it would otherwise have ended up in landfill.
Cleaned and treated in his Brighton studio, the rope now forms the single, sprawling centrepiece of his new exhibition, Exhibition of Old Rope, which opens at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London.
David, 57, said the idea sprang from the idiom “money for old rope”.
He explained: “Old rope has no use. It’s also hard to recycle, so there’s a lot of it lying around. I thought: what if I turn that into a literal exhibition of old rope? And then say, yes, this is art, and yes, you can buy it for £1 million.”
If stretched end to end, the rope would measure 20 miles, weighing more than an African bush elephant.
David collected the smaller pieces from shorelines across the UK, while larger lengths came from mooring lines, tree surgeons and offshore infrastructure.
He said: “The work exists because I’m interested in the value people place on art.
“I think £1 million is a fair price – partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.”
David’s career has long blended humour with conceptual provocation.
His earlier Tennis Ball Exchange, also at Stephen Friedman, invited visitors to swap an old tennis ball for a fresh one, slowly transforming neat shelves of new yellow spheres into a chaotic display of battered, discoloured replacements.
More recently, his three-metre animatronic sculpture The Mantis Muse was installed at his former school in Leicester to promote arts education.
Exhibition of Old Rope runs from November 13 to December 20 – and one buyer could walk away with a million pounds’ worth of frayed maritime leftovers.
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