Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles When you think of a sculpture, you probably imagine one of these. But would you ever imagine something that can fit in the eye of a needle? Huh? Meet Willard Wiggle. I'm Dr. Willard Wigan, MBE. I make the smallest sculptures in the world. I've made 14 camels in the eye of a needle, the queen's carriage. And I've made one of the queen herself, Mount Rushmore, Sunseeker yacht, Evolution of Man, Mary Antoinette. Little Red Riding Hood, Einstein, and more. I'd be here forever, trying to tell you that many, you know. It all began with an ant's nest. I thought the ants are homeless. So I started making them tables and chairs. I started picking up little fragments of splinters and slicing them and constructing and building little houses. I'm autistic and in school, they didn't really care. I call it a learning difference. I just learned different to anybody else. I started experimenting to see how small I could really go. How do you make something so beautiful? When I'm working on a microscopic level, I have to work between my heartbeat because if I don't, the pulse in my finger will cause problems. But the tools are very important because they all vary. There's all different types of tools. The cutting is the most important thing; slicing and twisting and bending and manipulating. I use a little broken shard of diamond, smashed, and it's like a little splinter. It looks like a stone age splint, big microscopic. So it's like my pulse is a little jack hammer, chiseling away till I get the shape I want. I normally pluck an eyelash out from the corner of my eye and then attach it to a little cocktail stick and then I paint with it. I work on five at a time. If I work on one, it'll drive me mad. I have two world records. The smallest sculptures ever made by human hands. No machine, no nanotechnology. But these micro sculptures don't always go to plan. I remember once I was making a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland. After I'd made the Mad Hatter, I made the teapot. (I) made Alice separately and I was lifting her, put her into the needle and my mobile phone went off. I went like this, "Who's that?" And I inhaled Alice. It's just went... she's in my cavity somewhere. Gone. The work that I do, it doesn't belong to me. I like other people seeing it. I like to sit there and watch them. Some people burst into tears when they see my work, you know, and that brings it home to me what I've done. The time that I've put in has been worth it. So, what next for Willard? An ice stack in the needle? Yeah, that's a good one. I wanna do that, you know.
B1 GreatBigStory needle alice slicing smallest sculpture Meet the Man Making the Smallest Sculptures in the World 7057 68 林宜悉 posted on 2023/05/08 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary