Meet the Man Making the Smallest Sculptures in the World

When you think of a sculpture,  you probably imagine one of these.  Would you ever imagine something that  can fit in the eye of a needle? Huh? Meet Willard Wigan. I'm Dr Willard Wigan MBE. I make the smallest sculptures in the world. I've made fourteen camels in the eye of a needle... The Queen's carriage And I've made one of the Queen herself Mount Rushmore Sunseeker Yacht Evolution of man Marie-Antoinette Little Red Riding Hood Einstein, and more. I'd be here forever trying to tell you.  I've done that many you know. It all began with an ant's nest. I thought the ants were homeless, so I started making them tables and chairs. I started picking up little fragments of splinters and slicing them and constructing and building little houses. I'm autistic and in school they  didn't really care. I call it a learning difference - I just learn different to anybody else. I started experimenting to see how small I could really go. How do you make something so beautiful? When I'm working on a microscopic level, I have to work between my heartbeat because if I don't, the pulse in my finger will cause problems. But the tools are very important because they all vary. There's all different types of tools. The cutting is the most important thing. Slicing and twisting and bending and manipulating. I use a little broken shard of diamond- smashed- and it's like a little splinter. It looks like a stone age splint being microscopic. So it's like my pulse is a little jackhammer chiselling away until I get the shape I want. I normally pluck an eyelash out from the corner of my eye then I attach it to a little cocktail stick and then I paint with it. I work on five at a time. If I work on one it'll drive me mad. [Music] I have two world records. The smallest sculptures ever made by human hands not no machine no nanotechnology. But these micro sculptures don't  always go to plan. I remember once I was making a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland. After I'd made the Mad Hatter and I made the teapot, I made Alice separately. And I was lifting her, put  her into the needle, and my mobile phone went off. I went like this. Who's that? And I inhaled Alice. It just went. She's in my cavity somewhere. Gone. The work that I do, it doesn't belong to  me. I like other people seeing it. I like to sit there and watch them. Some people burst into tears when they see my work, you know, and that brings it home to me what I've done. The time that I've put in has been worth it. So what next for Willard? I know he's stuck in the needle, yeah,  that's a good one. I'm gonna do that you know.

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 1,412,248

Keywords: great big story, gbs, lag, documentary, docs, art, artist, sculpture, sculptures, artwork, handmade, tiny, microscope, microscopic, sculpting, creative, Willard Wigan, willard wigan microsculpture, willard wigan smallest sculpture, microsculpture

Id: MK8m0jl2leY

Length: 2min 54sec (174 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023