Meet the Man Making the Smallest Sculptures in the World
The artist Willard Wigan has been making sculptures for six decades, and yet his entire body of work could fit in the palm of your hand.
His record-breaking micro-sculptures, which take months to complete, are made from fragments of pottery, flecks of gold and grains of sand.
And if you think the statues are small, imagine the tools used to make them. Willard has to craft them all himself, from hypodermic needles, shards of diamond and human eyelashes.
Measured in micrometers, and almost invisible to the human eye, Willard has built worlds inside the eye of a needle – Mount Rushmore, the Last Supper, the Moon Landing to name just a few.
He also holds the world record for the smallest sculpture ever made which is the size of a single human blood cell. It’s a sculpture of a fetus carved from Kevlar, and placed within the hollowed hole of a single hair. Truly mind boggling.
When he was 50, Willard was diagnosed with autism, which he credits as his “super power”” allowing him to see the world differently. He says he hopes his astonishing pieces will change other people’s understanding of the world too.
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