Anyone who has lost a piece of work they have slaved over – a file erased forever, say – will know the word traumatic sometimes doesn’t put too fine a point on the experience. Yet what if the labour of love you had invested so much of yourself into was smaller than the head of a pin – yet more intricate than many artworks thousands of times its size? Enter the world of micro-miniaturist Willard Wigan, where sculptures stand a fraction of a millimetre tall, all but invisible to the naked eye.
Wigan gives the phrase steady hands a whole new meaning. Using tools like a tiny surgeon’s knife, he carves figures out of materials including dust particles and sugar crystals, fragments of gold and grains of sand. He scrapes with immeasurable precision and uses a hair plucked from a dead fly’s back to paint his creations, sometimes spending months on end over a single piece. Such painstaking and emotionally sapping graft inevitably takes its toll.
With some of his pieces so infinitesimal they rest tenuously on the tip of a human eyelash, it’s perhaps small wonder that Wigan’s work has had its mini-catastrophes. He once lost a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland as he was moving her to a needle; she simply disappeared, inhaled perhaps in Wigan’s own breath. Yet there are also great highs in what he does – not least people’s astonishment when they see the miniscule fruits of his labour for their own eyes.
Restored attachments:
scary