Willard Wigan

When I was a kid, I had trouble at school because of my learning disabilities. Carving is my body compensating for the lack of other skills.

I became obsessed with making more and more tiny things. I think I was trying to find a way of compensating for my embarrassment at having learning difficulties: people had made me feel small so I wanted to show them how significant 'small' could be.

I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn't hold me back and my teachers couldn't criticize me. That's how my career as a micro-sculptor began.

As a kid, I lived in a fantasy world. I used to believe ants could talk. Not once did they say thank you.

We didn't have money for toys, so I made my own.

I was told I would become nothing. Now I am showing people how big nothing is.

Flying helicopters is what I do for fun.

I'm like a mad professor, but without the spiky hair.

My teacher said my brain was the size of a pea. He made my life miserable by singling me out in the classroom as a failure.

There is a child in all of us.

People find it very, very difficult to believe what I've done. Scientists have seen my work and they can't explain it. Even nano-scientists have seen it and been totally shocked. But if any man on Earth wants to challenge me, I'm ready. Bring it on.

At school I'd want to be so small that nobody could see me, and so my work depicts and reflects me - what it felt like to grow up in a world of pain.