Willard Wigan MBE

A few years ago, my partner Ben and I went to Bath specifically to see an exhibition by an artist called Willard Wigan. When we arrived at the gallery we were greeted by a very happy receptionist, who said we were very lucky as the artist is here. We walked up the stairs to the gallery, I was nervous and excited, and were met enthusiastically by Willard, a charismatic, tall man wearing a beautiful long cashmere coat.  Willard is internationally renowned artist for his sculptures which are smaller than a grain of sand, invisible to the naked eye, a microscope is needed to see these incredible sculptures. They have to be measured in micrometres (one of which is equal to a millionth of a metre), and some are smaller than a blood cell.

Wigan’s tiny art began when he was a five-year-old living in Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom and it was born from a need to escape. “I had a problem with learning to read and write,” he says. “I wouldn’t call myself illiterate. I just have a learning difference.”

Willard’s “learning difference” is that he has Asperger’s syndrome, but this remained undiagnosed in the early days. “Teachers didn’t know about autism, so I was used as an example of failure,” he says. “They would take me around the school and tell the kids about me. I become an exhibit, which was traumatising.” He recalls running home and hiding in the garden shed.

In the garden, his dog unearthed a colony of ants while digging holes, and he decided to make them a place to live, as well as a palace for the queen ant. “I really did think they were just like little people. I used to sit and have a conversation with them to see if they’d talk back. Of course, they never did,” he says with a laugh.

When Wigan’s mother saw what he had made, he says she was in a state of disbelief. “She said, ‘You make these little things, when you get older, your name will get bigger. The smaller you make them, the bigger your name will become. If you throw a grain of sand into the sea it will create a tidal wave of success. And that tidal wave will take you on a journey’,” Wigan says.

And that’s when his journey began. He’d carve Beatrix Potter characters on to the head of a toothpick and show them to his mother, who would tell him they were too big. “I wanted to please my mum and see how small I could actually go,” he says. “It became an obsession.”

Taking his art smaller was almost a reflection of what was happening to him at school. The smaller he felt, the smaller he carved and the more he withdrew into himself. “I used to want to disappear; I wanted to be invisible, because I hated what was happening to me, but I didn’t get bitter, I got better,” he says.

He also has a gift a lot of us wish for: patience. Willard told us that his sculptures often take a few months to complete, and he must slow his pulse down so that his work doesn’t go into the air just through a pulse in his thumb.

Because his sculptures are so small, the skill and dexterity with which he must work has to be extremely controlled. “I started to learn to breathe properly,” he says. “I’d squeeze my fingers together to stop the pulse from moving my finger. Then I stared to hold my breath, and I found that each time my pulse stopped, there was more stability.” He also makes his own tools that are small and sharp enough to carve with precision under the microscopic. These include sharpened needles, fine bits of razorblade attached to toothpicks, and shards of diamond. “When I wake up in the morning, I get a magnifying glass and look on the pillow for eyelashes. They become my paintbrushes,” he says.

He also must make sure that he doesn’t breathe in at the wrong time – a lesson that he learned when making the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party scene from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, he had made all the characters, the table, teacups and teapot and was about to paint Alice when a sudden intake of breath meant he inhaled her, instead. 

The sheer scale and detail that Wigan is now able to achieve under the microscope is astonishing. “When I do exhibitions, I see people looking through the microscope and they can’t believe what they’re seeing,” he says. “Even scientists and people in the world of nanotechnology can’t believe what they see. Surgeons are now approaching me wanting to know how I do it.”

“Human beings always use the word nothing,” he says. “But there’s no such thing as nothing. It’s the little things that can make the biggest things happen in our lives.”

“Once in an old castle in the midst of a large dense forest…”

In 1992, Louise Bourgeois produced several cells devoted primarily to the theme of childhood. Cell (Choisy) “alluded” to her childhood home, Cell (Three white marble spheres) evoked the family trio and referred to education. Cell (You Better grow Up) is a summation of the whole series, and consists of mirrors, glass balls and clasped hands enclosed in a cell, a “seven by seven – foot cube.” Its sides are made of woven iron bars and glass. Three hands are carved in a block of pink marble. “Sitting on three pieces of wooden furniture are objects: a glass tower and three perfume bottles, a ceramic container with three openings, and a stack of glass shapes. The three hands are a metaphor for psychological dependency. The one large hand is holding the two small childlike hands as if to protect them. It is the hand of mentor of guide, of an active compassionate, responsible adult. The little hands are helpless and dependent. They are in a state of fear and anxiety, which makes them passive.”

Cell (You better grow up) 1993

The mirrors are set on the ceiling and walls, these enlarge the “cell” offering a form of escape. The mirrors “superimpose” each other, giving a multiple view of the world.

“The mirrors reflect the many difficult realities, one worse than the next. To the child the world they show seems distorted and disordered. To the reasonable adult, the view they give is not a frightening one, because, because the mechanism of the hinge is obvious”.

The perfume bottles put us in a nostalgic mood with the powerful recall of smell.

“The self-indulgent shapes in glass and in ceramic are a form of romanticism, a state of abandon, a laissez-faire attitude, a childlike dream.” says Bourgeois.

The older Bourgeois gets, the more, I feel she approaches her earliest childhood memories, and the size of her “reconstructions of childhood feelings” increase to “life – size” proportions.

‘You can arrest the present. You just have to abandon everyday your past. And accept it. And if you can’t accept it, then you have to do sculpture! You see, you have to do something about it. If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, then you have to re – create it. Which is what I have been doing.’

Bourgeois’s approach is compared to Annette Messager. In a 1990 series Histoire des Robes, produced in homage to her mother, Messager enclosed wedding (or first communion) gowns in coffin – like boxes, like sacred relics, the dresses are joined by memories and associations contained in drawings and photographs.

Annette Messager, Histoire des Robes, 1990

“Each replaces a body and alludes to its now – stilled movements. These works are emphatically mortuary, and, as do photographs, each prolongs a presence: a child with its fairy tales, a woman whose desire for physical movement is represented by photographed body parts, a mother with age inscribed in the lines on her hands and breasts.”

Messager’s methods recalls the writings of Brono Bettelheim, which she admires: he asserted that fairy tales have a psychological function for children: they gain an understanding of the world not only through rational comprehension of it but by imaginary experience. Messager mixes up ordinary objects with fairy tale concoctions like the Man in the Moon “and mythical characters such as the weaver Arachne to create a visual fantasia that cannot be interpreted rationally.”

“The fairy tales I love seem amusing and funny, but in fact they’re terrifying and cruel at the same time. I would like to achieve that kind of effect, and not out of cynicism but because I am caught up in my contradictions, in my fears.”

Messager thinks she is “always between fairy tales and popular religious images like ex votos.” which she is very fond of.

“In fairy stories the hero or heroine is thrown into serious danger at the very beginning of the story. It’s a magnification of real life in which the calm, friendly world can suddenly turn unstable, bristle with threats and dangers.”

Further on in the interview with Robert Storr, Messager proceeds with her discussion about fairy.

“I like these highly codified fetishistic rituals in which the hero has to find the foot to fit an abandoned shoe or gold ring. Everything is inflated, amplified, theatricalized. In fairy tales women can only be fairies or princesses, witches or wicked stepmothers, they always have to play highly codified roles like those I have attributed to myself.”

Messager incorporated a sense of fairy tale magic in her series Chimaeras (Chimeres) 1982 large “photographic composites” which have taken the shapes of the bogeyman. Chimaeras attract and disgust simultaneously.

“These installations are lurid and luxurious, oversize, overpainted, over theatrical, they breach ‘decorum and violate’ the integrity of both painting and sculpture with a hysterical disorder.”

Chimaeras are imaginary creatures that seem to belong in fairy tales, and are usually given a female personality or identity: bats; witches; bare and twisted trees; giant spiders and oversize objects, such a scissors and keys where size is threatening are combined with photographs of various body parts, blown up, torn, painted, mounted on canvas. Messager explains:

“For me, it’s a ‘natural’ gesture to rip bodies apart, cut them up…It’s also my desire to reveal scraps, fragments, instants of things; so that there are only a few precious traces, so that the viewer reconstitutes his or her own direction.”

Messager’s Chimaeras were specifically inspired by the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau’s 1884 ‘The Chimaeras’ Messager wanted to combine the fantastic and the horrific with imagery of daily life.

Chimaeras (Chimeres) 1982 - 84  

“In olden times when wishing still helped…”

Fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of years and first became what we call literary fairy tales towards the end of the seventeenth century. They offered themselves as one more pastoral entertainment for courtiers, pretending to be the work not of respected academics who sponsored them, but of the child and/or the nurse of the child. Very little has been written about the transition of the folk tale to the fairy tale, why this occurred and how. Historical and sociological studies have show that the fold tale originated as far back as the ‘Megalithic period, and that ‘common people’ have been the story tellers. Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fairy tales were and still are in third world countries, told to adults as well as to children. During the late nineteenth century the public could find stability in the ordered formula and structure of fairy tales. They could be taken from the corruptions of adulthood back to the innocence of childhood: from complex morality to the simple issue of good versus evil.  This comparable to the place where Annette Messager wishes to take us, which I will discuss later.

After the Grimm Brothers made their first collection in 1812, folk tales were gathered, transcribed and printed for the purpose of ‘establishing authentic versions’. The tales were often stylized or changed. A typical view of the emergence of Grimm’s fairy tales became a story as ‘charming and as loved’ as any of the actual tales; and just as permanent, and as immune to subversion by any consciousness of the facts of the real world. A common and fairly recent statement of that tale is that the Grimm’s, we are told, ‘spent most of their time wondering about the country, leaning from peasants and the simpler townspeople a rich harvest of legends, which they wrote down as nearly as possible in the words in which they were told.’

Is this just a fairy tale itself, appealing but untrue? According to John M. Ellis this is disappointingly so, it can be proven to be false, and a large part of published evidence has been attainable for over a hundred and fifty years, the rest completely unattainable for over fifty years.

‘Fairy tales for children as universal, ageless, therapeutic, miraculous and beautiful. This is the way they have come down to us in history inscribed on our minds, as children and then as adults.’

'Once upon a fairy tale'

The following is the opening and first excerpt of my dissertation ‘Once upon a fairy tale – Locate the artistic impact/influence of the legacy of childhood, specifically childhood fantasies and fairy tales, in the works of Permindar Kaur; Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager.’

“Now here’s a story to begin with…”

What is a fairy tale, how is it defined? One definition included in an essay about fairy tales in 1931 in which Karel Capek decided:

‘A fairy story cannot be defined by its motif and subject-matter, but by its origin and function…A true folk fairy tale does not originate in being taken down by the collector of folklore but in being told by a Grandmother to her Grandchildren, or by one member of the Yoruba tribe to other members of the Yoruba tribe, or by a professional storyteller to his audience in an Arab coffee house. A real fairy tale, a fairy tale in its true function, is a tale within a circle of listeners…’

There are many contemporary art practitioners whose work has been shaped by ‘The legacy of childhood’: Matt Collishaw; Jordan baseman; Jane and Louise Wilson; Kerry Stewart’s ‘The boy from the chemist is here to see you, 1993 in which she placed a fibreglass charity figure of a ‘cripple’. ‘The boy evokes memories of dusty shop – fronts where donation – box figures waited plaintively for coins to be pressed through their heads’. Georgina Starr’s work ‘visit to a small planet’ 1995 was created from Starr’s vivid childhood memories of watching an old Jerry Lewis film and reacting to the family life around her: ‘Starr’s parents arguing excitedly, while she gobbles ravioli from a tin and devoured TV programmes with equal enthusiasm’. Starr relied on recollection and ‘the ravioli’s ability to conjure the fantasies from that time.’

I will be discussing the work of Annette Messager; Louise Bourgeois; and Permindar Kaur, because as well as the strong influence of childhood memories within their work, I am interested in locating the influence of fairy tales and the uncanny. The concept of the uncanny was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1919, it was described by Freud as that “class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. I discuss the question of the presence of the uncanny in fairy tales, stressing my theory, and locating several contrasting opinions.

I will be looking at the psychological and moralistic importance of fairy tales, throughout a child’s character development. Bruno Bettelheim stresses the importance throughout his book ‘The uses of enchantment’. ‘Fairy tales, unlike any other form of literature direct the child to discover his identity and calling and they also suggest what experiences are needed to develop his character further.’ I then go on to discuss ‘The mirror phase’, in relation to fairy tales, and the way a child thinks and experiences the world. ‘A fairy tale is a universe in miniature’.

In the section titled ‘In olden times when wishing still helped…’ I will be discussing the emergence of fairy tales. This is lead by two quotes by Jack Zipes:

‘Fairy tales have been with us for centuries as a necessary part of our culture’ and ‘Was there ever a time when people did not tell fairy tales?’

‘Fairy tales and the art of subversion’ by Zipes, is one of the first attempts to develop a social history of the fairy tale. Educational writers deliberately ‘appropriate’ the oral folk tale in the eighteenth century and made it into discourse about values and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time. Zipes asks questions which link the fairy tale to society and to our political unconscious. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children? How did they react to the prescribed fairy – tale discourse? “Fairy tales underwent severe criticism when the new discoveries of psychoanalysis and child psychology revealed just how violent, destructive, and even sadistic a child’s imagination is.”

It seems as applicable to include a brief history of the fairy tale, as it is to give an account of the source of influence, or root of the discussed art practitioners work. The emergence of the folk tale is as important to the understanding of fairy tales, as the use of the fairy tale motifs as a source, is to the said artists. It gives us a knowledge of how the fairy tale/Artist work evolved.

Gallery 21

Some of my work is being exhibited at Gallery 21, Salisbury.

https://www.gallery21.co.uk/artists/jennifer-mosley/107/?data_source=local