PARTICK Thistle fans will be giving their team the thumbs up tonight, thanks to some unique foam hands created by Turner Prize nominee David Shrigley.
The artist, responsible for the club’s ghoulish sunshine mascot Kingsley, is giving the substantial digit away ahead of the unveiling of Really Good, a giant, bronze thumbs-up, on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Shrigley said: “The ‘thumbs up’ gesture is universally understood as meaning something is good so, as a Jags fan, I thought what better way to show our support than to give the guys a giant thumbs up.
“The piece I designed for the Fourth Plinth is 10 metres high. I wanted to create a version based on the traditional foam finger for fans to take home, albeit a bit smaller than the original.”
Shrigley’s thumb will be given to the first 2,000 Jags fans through the turnstile at tonight’s game against Dundee United. “The foam thumb also allows fans to get a bit interactive during the match and really feel like part of the game by giving a thumbs-up when the guys are playing well,” he said.
The artist is a long-time fan of the team from Glasgow’s leafy west end. He first became officially involved when sponsor Kingsford Capital Management asked him to create a mascot based on their logo.
In June last year the world was introduced to Kingsley, a monobrowed, Lisa Simpson like figure, so unlike any other sports team mascot in the world that he fast became a global sensation.
It was the start of a new relationship between the club and contemporary artists. In the last year Partick Thistle fans have received limited edition footballs designed by Barry McGhee, scarves designed by Jon Rubin, a special yellow card by Jonathan Monk and a seat cushion by Kota Ezawa.
Shrigley is one of the country’s best known and most popular artists. The Glasgow School of Art graduate was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013 and his work has been purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Really Good will take its place on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth later this year. The plinth in the north-west corner of the square was originally intended for a statue of William IV. A lack of money saw the plinth stand empty for over 150 years.
Since 2005, the Mayor of London has operated a temporary commission where a different piece of art takes over the plinth. Currently the space is occupied by Hans Haacke’s skeletal Gift Horse.
The art critic of the Daily Telegraph said Shrigley’s Really Good “offers a bathetic ‘all right, mate?’ rendered in the materials of heroic traditional sculpture”, adding: “There’s something inevitably phallic in the extended perpendicular thumb, but it isn’t overstated.”
London Mayor Boris Johnson called it “wryly enigmatic”.
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