Nanosculpture

Just noted: a recent article in the Telegraph on the amazing Willard Wigan:

'It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me," says Willard Wigan, a 50-year-old sculptor from Birmingham who will next week be awarded an MBE for services to art. "I was sculpting the whole cast of Alice in Wonderland and I was really looking forward to finishing it because it was that good, it would probably have been my best piece so far. . .

"But just as I was about to put Alice in place alongside the other characters," he 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."

Inadvertent inhalation of artworks is not an occupational hazard that one normally associates with sculpture: Rodin famously indulged in fits of heavy breathing while shaping his erotic masterpieces, without inflicting any damage upon the final work. But Willard Wigan is no ordinary sculptor. He describes himself as a "micro-miniaturist", and all of his most significant pieces - over 40 years' worth of painstaking carving and chipping and painting - could fit comfortably together inside a single matchbox.

To the naked eye, each of Wigan's works is all but invisible; an unidentifiable speck that reveals its true form, in mind-boggling detail, only when placed under the microscope and magnified 500 times. In one piece, Henry VIII and his six wives stand side by side within the eye of a needle. In another, a startled cat, eyes wide, back arched, clings to an eyelash taken from Wigan's ex-girlfriend ("I hope she never asks for it back," he says). And his latest work, shown here for the first time, is a startlingly accurate reproduction of the Lloyd's building in London, perched on the tip of a needle.

Wigan's website is here; there is also going to be an exhibition and charity auction of the Lloyd's building (the one on the tip of the needle, that is) at the David Lloyd Gallery in London on July 24th.

Posted by David on July 16, 2007 9:56 PM