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Look
at this feat of engineering genius!!
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Origins: Willard Wigan is a "micro-miniaturist," an
artist known for creating some of the world's smallest sculptures. As he and
his work are described on his
Willard Wigan was born in Birmingham, England in 1957 and
is the creator of the smallest works of art on earth. From being a traumatised
and unrecognised dyslexic child, he is now emerging as the most globally
celebrated micro-miniaturist of all time and is literally capable of turning a
spec of dust into a vision of true beauty.
Willard can create a masterpiece within the eye of a tiny sewing needle, on the
head of a pin, the tip of an eyelash or a grain of sand. Some are many times
smaller than the fullstop at the end of this sentence.
Many are even smaller still, with some being completely invisible to the naked
eye yet, when viewed through high power magnification, the effect
on the viewer is truly mesmerising. Willard, who is completely self-taught has
baffled medical science and been the subject of discussions among
micro-surgeons, nano-technologists and at universities worldwide. His work is
ground-breaking
He works in total solitude at a quiet retreat in Jersey mainly at night when
there is a greater sense of peace in the world and less static electricity to
interfere with the immeasurable precision and tolerances required to create the
pieces.
The smallest sculptures can only be measured in thousandths of an inch which is
why they can sit, very delicately, on a human hair three thousandths of an inch
thick. When working on this scale he slows his heartbeat and his breathing
dramatically through meditation and attempts to harmonise his mind, body and
soul with the Creator. He then sculpts or paints at the centrepoint between
heartbeats for total stillness of hand. He likens this process to "trying
to pass a pin through a bubble without bursting it." His concentration is
intense when working like this and he feels mentally and physically drained at
the end of it.
Willard Wigan works with materials such
as toothpicks, sugar crystals, and grains of rice and sand, spending months
meticulously carving his materials into micro-figures like the ones displayed
above. Additional examples of this work can be viewed in the