Film and The Arts

Productions

Over the years Ouse Valley Bait has supplied maggots and flies for many productions. Our customers have included the BBC, Damien Hurst, Stephen Spielberg and what was probably our most ambitious project, the supply of 13 different coloured maggots for Nick Knight and Alexander McQueen’s Angel – an artwork to celebrate the millennium.

If you have any leading roles for our flies and maggots, please contact Simon Grant – Contact Us.

Of Maggots and Madonnas

Text by Susannah Frankel

The concept is quintessential Knight/McQueen. Create the face of an angel and place it, pride of place, in a church in the southern French town. Nothing much new about that, you might think, except that instead of using stained glass or any other such obvious and/or widely deemed appropriate materials, the pair constructed the piece entirely out of dyed maggots – 80 gallons of dyed maggots, to be precise. It’s a frankly horrifying thought, which is, of course, the point. The designer and photographer have by now collaborated on more than one idea that subverts our preconceptions of what is and isn’t beautiful. Ideas that, on the face of it, may rile the more politically correct among us and appear to be no more than sensational, once executed seem rather more tender, lovely – moving even – than had been expected.