David Shrigley’s bizarre football mascot
There’s an art to mastering the design of a football mascot that, in 2015, David Shrigley failed with such flair that it was almost a success. But then you look at the long-suffering yellow blob he created for Scottish football team Partick Thistle FC and realise no amount of artsy mental gymnastics will justify the horror. Shrigley’s artwork, outside of this monstrosity – which he named Kingsley – usually trades on poignant wording, tackling dark themes with stark lines. Why exactly the man behind such creations as Merry Ecezema and Kill Your Pets was brought on to design something so closely associated with halftime cheer remains a mystery.
As with most artworks that don’t land, Kinglsey became the stuff of meme sensation. The first mistake was unveiling its bizarre appearance on Twitter, resembling something between a child’s drawing of the sun and a monobrowed egg yolk. You can imagine the reaction. He was called an “eldritch abomination” and a frontrunner in the “scariest mascot in football” debate – per a vote by Soccer AM that saw him beat Brazil’s Canarinho to the honour.
The speed at which the public seized on Kingsley, the collective crack of the knuckles as horrified football fans took to Twitter to insult him, was the most inspiring element of his role as a mascot. His ugliness inspired creativity on levels that shocked even Shrigley. At peak Kingsley hysteria, Partick Thistle’s mascot became the seventh most popular trending story worldwide, which the artist said was never the intention.
“We’ve tried to come up with gimmicks before without success, so this has been astonishing,” he told the Daily Record at the time. “I created about 50 different mascot images, but the one which was chosen wasn’t the cheery type you expect to see. They wanted something which said: ‘We are Partick Thistle, and we are not so cuddly any more.'”
Kingsford manager Mike Wilkins worked alongside Shrigley to come up with a logo after the two met at a San Francisco art exhibition and got talking football. “Mike and I had a chat about what kind of logo we wanted, and Mike is very familiar with my work, so we came up with that,” he explained. “It is synonymous with what people know me for. I am the go-to guy for crudely drawn, modern sense-of-humour cartoons. It is gallows humour, I guess.”
Not sensing the internet furore embracing that style would cause, Wilkins was quite enthusiastic about having something less generic, eventually arriving at the point where Shrigley was forced to explain the yellow creature was, in fact, a sun and not the melted head of Lisa Simpson.
“They wanted a bit of angst,” he insisted. “I hear people say Kingsley is scary, but it’s only a scary image from a three-year-old’s view.”
