If you visit the exhibition of tiny animals created by the UK’s most famous microscopic artist, you’d better polish your glasses first.

David Lindon has previously made headlines for recreating a Banksy painting as well as Mickey Mouse in teeny tiny proportions.

He has now made a menagerie of miniature creatures for his first solo exhibition, the World’s Smallest Zoo, with each contained inside the eye of a needle, or even the head of a pin.

‘You cannot see them with the naked eye; they’re that tiny,’ David tells Metro.co.uk. ‘You have to look at them through the through the magnifier.’

The smallest exhibit on show in Wolverhampton is a penguin which is so small it sits on the head of a pin, at 0.25mm x 0.3mm. Most of the others are all smaller than 1mm in all directions.

Making the art is a painstaking process where things can go wrong in a heartbeat – literally.

‘You can lose the art in an instant,’ David said of his work done in a meditative state in the middle of the night to avoid noises and vibrations from traffic.

‘You have to basically become a dead man if that’s the right word; a zombie. You have to slow your heartbeat down. I’ve got to control every muscle every fibre of my body. I control the microscope with my feet, sat there at night with the curtains drawn.’

‘I must be mad and I don’t really enjoy it!’ David admits. ‘But when it’s done it’s such a relief.’

After the tension of creating the art – which sometimes really does get destroyed with a rogue twitch – he gets the joy and satisfaction from looking at the works and seeing others mesmerised.

That’s why he plans to be at his exhibition over the Easter weekend, wearing a purple pinstriped suit and ‘looking like Willy Wonka’ so he will be easy for guests to spot.

‘People look at the needles with their own eyes and can hardly see it at all as it’s so small. So then they do a double take and look at it again through the magnifier and go, ‘Oh it really is that small; I can’t believe it’. That’s the reaction I love.’

David says that some people assume he must do his painting using human hairs, but he says they are much too thick for that. They would even be ‘massive’ in comparison to the size he needs.

So what about the leg of a fly? Others tell him they think that would be the right sized tool.

But he says: ‘Don’t be daft; you’ve got too many joints and elbows and it’s not stiff enough.’

Instead, he makes his own microscopic tools, even though they don’t last for long as they are so tiny they usually break after a couple of hours of use.

‘Every tool you can imagine you might find in your garden shed, I’ve got that alongside my microscope, but microsized,’ he says. And sometimes he even loses them because they are so small.

For the artworks themselves, he uses a variety of mediums including things likecarbon fibre, carpet fibres and even bits of gold and bits of diamonds: ‘anything that catches the eye’.

To colour the art he uses crushed micro pigments.

David hopes that his first solo exhibition may later he shown in his own hometown Bournemouth, and perhaps even London and New York.

In the meantime, you can see the World’s Smallest Zoo at Wolverhampton’s Change Makers Hub for the Easter holidays (March 22 to April 8) put on by Enjoy Wolverhampton BID and Hammond Galleries.

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Jen Mills

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