This Lego Brick Is About the Size of a Human White Blood Cell. It Just Became the World’s Smallest Sculpture
Created by microscopic artist David A. Lindon, the record-breaking sculpture measures just 0.00099 by 0.00086 inches and can’t be seen with the human eye
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An English artist has broken the world record for the smallest hand-made sculpture ever crafted: a tiny lego piece measuring 0.00099 by 0.00086 inches—a bit larger than a human white blood cell.
“It’s madness, I know,” David A. Lindon tells BBC News’ Emily Ford. “I love the challenge. I love the discipline.”
Lindon is known for his microscopic artworks, including sculptures that fit in the eyes of needles and recreations of Vincent van Gogh paintings that measure just 0.02 inches tall. For his latest project, the artist created three Lego bricks of varying sizes: an eight-stud piece, a four-stud piece and a one-stud piece.
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His four-stud brick was the first to break the record, which had been set in 2017 by microscopic artist Willard Wigan (who inspired Lindon to start making tiny art). But then, Lindon broke the record a second time with his one-stud brick, which was even smaller.
Crafting such small artworks is grueling work, requiring a complete lack of disturbance. To make his Lego sculptures, Lindon worked during the night to avoid vibrations of daytime car traffic, per BBC News.
“The challenge to create tiny objects that can’t be seen without a microscope is demanding both physically and mentally,” he says in a statement from Guinness World Records. “I have trained myself to slow my breathing and work between the beats of my heart. Even the pulse of my heart beating through my fingers creates too much movement.”
Lindon’s three Lego bricks can’t be seen with the human eye. After experts from Evident Scientific measured it via light microscope, specialists at Spectrographic Limited also verified its size. The previous record holder was Wigan’s Kevlar sculpture of a fetus, situated in a hollowed piece of hair.
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Wigan and Lindon are both known for the artworks they’ve created in the eyes of needles or atop pinheads. The sculptures require special miniature tools, which Lindon creates himself, per BBC News. For materials, he uses microscopic pigments, dust, carpet fibers and even beetle antennae, as he writes on his website.
Lindon’s most famous works are perhaps his three microscopic recreations of van Gogh paintings, which the artist embedded inside a wristwatch. He spent six months making tiny versions of the Dutch master’s The Starry Night, Sunflowers and Self-Portrait With Grey Felt Hat in honor of the Van Gogh Museum’s 50th anniversary.
Before becoming a microscopic artist, Lindon was an engineer who worked on the small instrumentation inside airplane cockpits. When he started making art in 2019, he quickly learned the perils of his new craft. Once, while creating a miniature spider sculpture, he breathed in a little too swiftly. “I think it went up my nose,” the artist told CBC Radio’s Lane Harrison in 2023.
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Something similar happened to Lindon’s recreation of a Picasso painting: His hand twitched, tearing the work to pieces. “I could have cried,” he told CBC Radio. “I was mortified. I was so upset with myself.”
Lindon is currently working on a series of eye-of-a-needle sculptures of animals, which he will display in an upcoming exhibition called “The Smallest Zoo in the World.”
“I love the look of wonder and surprise on people’s faces when they see my art for the first time,” Lindon tells BBC News. “To see it in person, it blows your mind.”
