Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley has launched a London exhibition featuring a 10-tonne pile of discarded rope, priced at £1m.
He spent months collecting unwanted material – from cruise liner mooring lines to crab and lobster pot cords – which was treated and cleaned at his studio.
Shrigley said the exhibition started with an idiom: “Money for old rope”.
“Old rope has no use. It’s also hard to recycle, so there’s a lot of it lying around,” he said.
“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 £1m.”
Exhibition of Old Rope will run at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London from 13 November to 20 December.
Shrigley grew up in Oadby, a town on the outskirts of Leicester.
He went on to take the art and design foundation course at Leicester Polytechnic, then completed his education at the Glasgow School of Art, before working in Scotland for the better part of three decades.
He now lives in Brighton.
In 2024, he loaned a sculpture – The Mantis Muse – to his former school, Beauchamp College, to highlight the role that art plays in education, and to call for greater investment in it in British schools.
The sculpture was placed on campus for two weeks and used as the focus for a dedicated programme of lessons and activities for students and teachers – from life drawing to nature lessons and yoga classes.
Shrigley said art lessons at the school, where he studied from 14 to 18, were when he first formed the idea that he would like a career in art.
“I was quite lucky, I had some really inspirational teachers, ended up going to art school and the rest is history,” Shrigley said.
“One teacher, Chris Tkacz, we tracked him down and did an interview as part of this project, and it was an opportunity just to sort of say, ‘You were a really big influence in my life, and without you, I might not have ended up studying art, might not have ended up being an artist.’”
