World's Tiniest Masterpieces, review: an artful tribute that was big on the wow factor

In World’s Tiniest Masterpieces (Channel 4), Wolverhampton-born artist Willard Wigan told of “the strange affair of The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party”. Back in 2016, he had been carefully sculpting the scene from Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice sits down to tea with the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse, and was just about to add its final, most important, figure. But then his mobile rang, and he took a sharp,  nasal intake of breath. “Alice got inhaled,” he said, ruefully. 

Wigan’s micro artworks, often framed within the eye of a needle, have an audible “wow factor”,  which this at times very touching documentary captured. “Wow,”  said one gallery visitor, looking through the lens of a microscope at one; “Oh wow,” said the next viewer. “Wowww,” said another.

Wigan’s techniques include using his own eyelashes as tweezers, and attaching shavings of diamonds to hypodermic needles to create tiny scalpels that resemble “Stone Age flint tools”. He creates all his art works by hand, taking advantage of the way that his own pulse causes tiny regular movements to create a jackhammer effect – a technique used when he carved a church from a grain of sand. His works can take up to five weeks  to complete and sell for tens of thousands of pounds.

The film-makers had great fun using scale as a visual effect, with Wigan strolling through the city as a giant or navigating table tops like a Lilliputian. There was hyperbole, too. But Wigan’s quiet memories of how his dyslexia had led to him being cruelly humiliated by a teacher, and forced him towards a world where he made insects his friends, spoke even more loudly. He had built ants minuscule houses from balsa wood as a five-year-old. His mother had recognised that his talent was unique and kept one  of them.

Over the course of the documentary, Wigan attempted to create the smallest handmade sculpture ever made, in memory of his mother. Other artists work at nanoscopic size but not without machines. Wigan was shown carving a single carpet fibre into a sculpture that would fit inside a hollowed-out strand of his own hair.

Watching Wigan struggle to control his movements gave the film an unexpected tension. He had me holding my breath as he battled the tyrannical force of static electricity. This portrait of an extraordinary  artist was television with a true sense of wonder.