The South Bank Centre in London was the venue for a very unusual art workshop last weekend. Hundreds of the blowfly larvae were daubed with paint by children to create abstract works of art as part of Pestival - a festival about insects which was held in the South Bank.
Organised by animal behaviour experts from Manchester University, the workshop attracted over 120 children and their collective work has been published on facebook. Dr Matthew Cobb, who bought the maggots in a fishing tackle shop, said “We wanted to show children – and grown-ups – that maggots are cute and not scary, and that they can make amazing patterns. We just put the maggots in non-toxic paint, and they did the rest, leaving wriggling paint trails behind them that look a bit like Jackson Pollock’s famous “action paintings”.
Of course Damien Hirst has used maggots before in his installation A Thousand Years. It featured a cows head in a glass container being eaten by maggots. When they turned into flies they were promptly dispatched by an electric fly zapper. Dr Cobb and his team took a more humane approach to their subjects, giving them a good wash down before releasing them in a compost heap.
Most important of all, the kids had a great time as Dr Cobb said “The children had great fun, and could even learn what colours maggots can see – by using torches producing different colours of light, they could direct the maggots around the paper.”
