Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Huge power...itty bitty living space

See this dude? His name is Willard Wigan. See that needle he's holding? See how teeny, tiny the eye of said needle is? He creates sculptures small enough to fit into the eye of that thar needle.

It all started when he was five, he says, suffering from dyslexia. To escape the constant criticism, he would create houses for ants, and then make outfits for them to wear. His sculptures were so tiny, that no one could see them in order to criticize them.
In one particular piece, written about in the Telegraph, he talks about a piece he was working on; all the characters of Alice in Wonderland. It was coming out so well, it was going to be his best piece to date.

"But just as I was about to put Alice in place alongside the other characters," [Wigan] pauses to compose himself - this big Brummie with conspicuous tattoos and diamond-encrusted watch, sucking in his bottom lip to stop it trembling - "I inhaled her. I breathed in at the wrong moment, and she was gone. In my panic, I accidentally wiped out some of the other characters too."

All of Wigan's artwork is small enough to fit on the head of a pin, and is carved with wee bits of diamond glued to the end of needles under 500X magnification. He paints his pieces with the hairs of a fly.
His chief materials, he says, are grains of sand. He says he has to work at night, when there are less cars on the road, and therefore less vibrations to disrupt his steady hand, which he controls by working between heartbeats.



Here we have Henry VIII with six of his wives. Doesn't he look like a philanderer and wife murderer?

See more pics of his pieces and read more about Willard Wigan here.

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