Willard Wigan and The Spider
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
Having just written the title of this post I’m thinking I may have inadvertently created a good name for a children’s book…
But I digress. Apparently The Hard Day’s Night Hotel in Liverpool plays piped Beatles music at all times - enough, surely, to send the most die-hard fan round the bend? I failed to notice whether this policy extends to the gallery when I visited last week as I was too busy peering through a microscope and marvelling at Willard Wigan’s microsculptures.
Willard creates sculptures that are so minute they are only visible through a microscope. Most of the pieces sit within the eye of a needle or on a pin head and some are only three times the size of a blood cell. The sculptures are incredible and include a yellow submarine set in the eye of the needle (well, we are in Liverpool after all) and a statue of liberty which was painted using an eyelash! Apparently Willard’s worst enemy is static and just occasionally he has an accident and inhales a whole sculpture…
Willard has just completed a sculpture of the Lloyds building in London. In order to make the cranes on the roof of the building he caught dust particles in the air and sculpted them.
There’s an image of the Lloyd’s building and other marvels including Elvis on a pinhead and the Titanic on the tip of a pin on Willard’s website
If you get a chance then go and see this exhibition, it’s incredible and it’s on until the 31st October
If in Liverpool you might also might also want to head over to Exchange Flags to check out Al Weiwei’s giant crystal spider entitled ‘Web of Light’ which forms part of the Liverpool Biennial. It’s best viewed at night and as my dodgy mobile phone pics don’t really do it justice go to John Kennan’s flickr webpage to see what it really looks like.
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