Microscope Art

Artist Willard Wigan Sculpts Microart That Requires a Microscope to View. The Birmingham, England, native is known as the creator of the world's smallest sculptures. He makes small worlds of their own that are almost invisible to the naked eye -- such as a $300,000 sculpture that sits on a pinhead. Under a microscope, you see an elephant carved from a fragment of a single grain of sand. "The tail is made from a floating particle of dust out of the air," Wigan explained. How does he do it? Wigan uses tiny, homemade tools to carve his sculptures out of grains of rice or sugar, and paints them with a hair plucked from a housefly's back. He said he's able to slow his heart down to work between the beats to avoid hand tremors. "Underneath microscopes, those tremors become an earthquake," he said. Working with the tiny art is precarious; he described working on a second Alice in Wonderland, because he lost the first one. "I was carrying her toward the needle, and then I looked again through the microscope and she'd gone. I think I inhaled her." With the patience to build a doll the size of a human blood cell, Wigan said the ultimate satisfaction is in the reaction of admirers. "The job satisfaction is people admiring it and being surprised and being shocked and being amazed. You know, people's mouths drop open in disbelief."