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Size matters
Willard Wigan has an artistic goal so tiny you can’t even see it, writes Simon Wroe
AS a child Willard Wigan was a landlord for ants, but he has downsized his operation since then. Today his portfolio features houses on the heads of pins and helicopters that can pass through the eye of a needle; the ants seem Godzilla like by comparison.
While the modern world increasingly lives by the axiom of “big is beautiful”, Wigan, a 52-year-old sculptor from Birmingham, is going the other way – into dimensions so small they can only be seen with a high-powered microscope. He hopes one day to make artworks that people can not see at all, at least not with the naked eye. How many self-respecting artists share that dream?
At the recently opened My Little Eye gallery in Bloomsbury, Wigan’s work looks like nothing more than tiny specks of dust sitting on top of pins and bottle tops.
Put your eye to the microscope and another world appears: a series of tiny, kitsch universes populated by celebrities and cultural icons. There’s Puff Daddy, standing a third the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence, next to a diamond. Elsewhere, Jonny Wilkinson kicks a rugby ball through the eye of a needle. Others show Dorothy and Toto, a T Rex, and magicians Siegfried and Roy with an unsettlingly large tiger.
As the work has gotten smaller, it has gotten harder. Wigan takes months on each piece, labouring through the night to avoid the unwelcome vibrations of traffic and abstaining from coffee, alcohol and other tremulous substances. For something particularly detailed, such as an eyeball, the muscular, six-foot Wigan spends hours of “intensive concentration”, calming his breathing and controlling his nervous system so his hands are supremely steady.
Nevertheless, there have been disasters. At a tense point while carving a scene from Alice in Wonderland, Wigan accidentally breathed in too sharply and inhaled the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party; an inquisitive fly knocked off a tightrope walker; and several Charlie Chaplins are lost in his carpet after flicking off an eyelash.
“Even though it drives me insane, I’ll carry on doing it. My life depends on making things small. I am a fanatic,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll pretend I’m doing an operation on someone and they’re going to die if I can’t get it that small. I’ve pushed it to levels where even nano scientists can’t explain it.”
When Wigan avoids the flies and the eyelashes, the work can fetch extraordinarily big prices. His version of the Lloyd’s building, on the head of a pin, sold to Lord Rogers, the project’s architect, for £94,000, making it the most expensive property per square inch in the world. His pieces sell for an average of £30,000. A businessman recently commissioned him to make something so small he couldn’t see it.
Willard made him a trio of superheroes (Batman, Superman and Spiderman) that were each five microns high (20 times smaller than this full stop).
Willard Wigan got where he is today by bunking off school. Diagnosed early on with dyslexia, he didn’t do well in his studies. Instead, he would “abscond a lot and sit at the bottom of the garden”, observing the busy march of the ants.
“I was captivated by this microscopic world. My brain went into overdrive. I used to build them houses with splinters of wood. Then I got carried away and started making the ants merry-go-rounds. I would coax the ants on with blobs of honey. I think they liked it. I know they didn’t pay me any rent though.”
He started experimenting, breaking off bits of his dad’s razors and carving ever smaller objects, things the teachers couldn’t find fault with. “I didn’t want anyone to see it really. If you couldn’t see it then you couldn’t criticise it,” he says.
When he was eight his imagination was fired by the biblical quote about a camel passing through the eye of the needle. Throughout his twenties and thirties he worked furtively on his microscopic world while holding down jobs in a pedal factory and as a woodcarving teacher in Nottingham.
“I never showed anyone the small stuff. I wasn’t really ready to release them yet. I’d been reclusing myself and building my collection. It never crossed my mind that people would be interested in it.” His secret only came to light when he carved the faces of two friends onto a matchstick as a wedding gift.
Wigan claims to make the smallest art in the world: “Smaller than the guy in China who carves grains of sand, or the Russian who makes microscopic Fabergé eggs.”
His next project is the Coronation coach, complete with the Queen and Prince Phillip and eight horses. “The carriage will be made of 24 carat gold. It will be perfect in every way,” he says. “I’m going to get a more powerful microscope and take it down to ridiculous levels. They haven’t seen the best of me yet.”
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