The statue of David carved out of a single grain of sand? The Thinker on a pinhead? Whip out your magnifying glass for Willard Wigan, nano sculptor. Paolo R. Reyes sizes him up in London

“To see the world in a grain of sand . . .
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.”
- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
 
You won’t find a single mounted canvas at My Little Eye Gallery in 40 Museum Street, London—only microscopes. That’s because the works of its most famous artist, nano sculptor Willard Wigan, 52, are invisible to the naked eye.

Measuring 0.0002 inches tall—roughly the size of a human blood cell—Wigan’s mind-boggling sculptures have ruffled the manicured field of medical science, baffling both micro-surgeons and nanotechnologists for its “sheer impossibility.”

Instead of marble, metal, or wood, he carves his miniscule masterpieces from a grain of sand, sugar, or rice—using fine surgical blades or a broken shard of diamond. His paintbrushes, on the other hand, border on the bizarre: strands of hair plucked from the head of a housefly. For display purposes, every finished piece is placed within the eye of a needle or mounted on a pinhead or the tip of a toothpick.

The most amazing aspect of his craft, however, is the process—a painful, obsessive exercise that involves three solitary months of confinement in his Jersey studio and an almost-superhuman mastery of his nervous system. “I need to work between heartbeats—to reduce the risk of hand tremors,” he revealed. “The pulse in my finger can cause a fatal mistake.”

There are occupational hazards as well—eyestrain, static friction, and the exasperating challenge of holding his breath. Once, while applying the finishing touches to his Alice in Wonderland micro-tableau, he mistimed his breathing and—like a Grimm fairytale gone wrong—accidentally inhaled Alice.

A self-taught miniaturist, Wigan’s reverence for all things great and small began at age 5, when he was a tormented schoolboy in Birmingham. Branded as “the class idiot” because of his undiagnosed dyslexia, he retreated into a complex fantasy world of ants.

An all-seeing giant among these tiny insects, he fashioned himself as a God of All Small Things, making them houses, chairs, tables, shoes, and hats out of wood splinters. “It was a way to compensate for the misery and ridicule, a place where my disability didn’t hold me back,” he recalled. “People made me feel small, so I wanted to show them how significant small could be.”

Today, Wigan’s diminutive figurines have been hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world.” His limited body of work—70 or so pieces that can comfortably fit in the palm of one’s hand—has been insured for £11.2 million. His last commissioned piece, a replica of Richard Rogers’s Lloyds of London building, was auctioned for £94,000.

In July 2007, Prince Charles—a Wigan collector himself, along with Elton John and Mike Tyson—honored his services to art with a chivalrous suffix, MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire). The title may not carry the monumental weight of a Knighthood or a Nobel, but for a man with a murderously difficult sense of artistry, it’s still no small wonder.