By ROBERT HARDMAN

Last updated at 00:04 01 September 2007

There cannot be many artists who have swallowed their own works by mistake. Then again, there cannot be many artists who can cheerfully put a six-figure price on something the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence.

"Take a look at this. It will blow you away," says Willard Wigan.

It is an ordinary sewing needle stuck to a piece of Blu-Tac in a plastic box. It is not blowing me anywhere.

Willard chuckles and leads me upstairs to the cluttered spare bedroom of his little house.

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A powerful electric microscope sits amid the rubbish on a small paint-splattered desk.

He sticks the eye of the needle under the microscope and then invites me to sit down. What appears through the lens does, indeed, leave me gasping.

"People often swear the first time they see my work. I like that," says Willard proudly.

This is certainly worth a string of exclamations. Because there, in incredible detail, is a hand-painted micro-sculpture of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party from Alice In Wonderland - right down to the sleeping dormouse and the card in the Mad Hatter's hat. I can even read the price tag in the label - ten shillings and sixpence (the actual price of this work, by the way, is £160,000).

And yet, when I don't use the microscope and, instead, look at the piece with my own eyes, I can detect nothing more than a speck of dust wedged in the eye of the needle. This speck, though, took more than three months to make it.

Willard Wigan is the world's pre- eminent micro-artist. He is an exceptional master craftsman. Now 50, he may have spent most of his life dismissed as an illiterate failure but he has a unique gift which, surely, constitutes artistic genius.

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Little wonder that when he received his MBE for services to art at Buckingham Palace six weeks ago, the Prince of Wales told Willard that his work was 'phenomenal'. Visitors to his forthcoming exhibition will, doubtless, agree.

As I try to get my head around the scale of the shrunken tea party, I ask Willard to provide a reference point, some sort of perspective to help me comprehend the smallness of this work.

He suggests a match and we delicately slide the little pink head of an ordinary matchstick alongside the tea party. It's like plonking a big red whale under the lens.

To get a closer comparison, we slip a fragment of a Daily Mail article into position. The whole sculpture, it transpires, is a little smaller than a full stop.

The writing on the Mad Hatter's label cannot, therefore, be much larger than some bacteria.

Willard explains that it was painted on using a hair from a dead fly.

He makes most of his models from zip tie, the plastic tags you find on clothes' labels, and he does his sculpting with tiny diamond shards glued to the end of an acupuncture needle.

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He chops me off a sliver of zip tie which looks no bigger than a grain of sand and puts it under the microscope. I try to cut it but it just pings off into oblivion.

Willard explains that he meditates to lower his pulse rate and, even then, he only uses his home-made scalpel between heartbeats. No wonder he has had some bizarre accidents.

"One of the worst moments was recently when I inhaled Alice," he recalls.

"I was just putting her in position when I breathed in at the wrong moment and she disappeared. That was nearly a month's work gone."

Almost as infuriating was the night when he had just finished attaching a tightrope walker the size of a breadcrumb to a tiny strand of a money spider's web.

"This fly came buzzing down past the lens and the gust from its wings blew the chap off his tightrope."

I have never come across anything quite like the Lilliputian world of Willard Wigan. Here is a big man - at least 6ft tall - who spends much of his life locked away in a tiny world beyond the normal scope of the human eye.

And yet he doesn't wear glasses. He hates the process of what he does - "it drives you mad; it makes you cry with frustration" - but he loves the reactions which his work inspires.

Untrained, his techniques have led to invitations from micro-surgeons to compare notes (still haunted by his lack of learning, he has declined). And for all his creative success, he is not part of any tiresome, self-regarding wing of the contemporary art movement. He is just Willard from Brum.

Now, after many years of obscurity and ridicule, life has suddenly taken off for this micro Michelangelo.

Just four months ago, Willard sold the bulk of his collection for a substantial sum to David Lloyd, the tennis playerturnedgym entrepreneur.

The price remains a secret, but Lloyd has insured the 70 pieces in the collection for more than £11million and is now Willard's manager.

Further excitement followed in July when Willard received his MBE at the Palace - "same day as Rod Stewart was there," he says proudly.

"Meeting Prince Charles changed my life. I've always liked him, but when he told me my work was 'phenomenal', it was as if I had been suffocating all my life and now, all of a sudden, I could breathe.

"When you've grown up with everyone saying you're a failure, a moment like that means everything."

His run of luck held firm and a few weeks later, as reported in the Mail, he was reunited with some long-lost favourites.

Six years ago, at a small London exhibition, someone stole three of Willard's finest eye- of-a-needle pieces: the Tower of London, Jesus, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

"The police cracked a terrible joke about "looking for a needle in a haystack" and I thought I'd never see them again," he says.

Then, last month, a member of the public made contact to say that he had found the missing pieces at a Swindon car boot sale and they were duly returned (although Snow White had lost four of her dwarves).

On Thursday, a free exhibition of Willard's work opens at London's Eyestorm gallery, next door to Tate Modern, with a European tour to follow. Meanwhile, two film companies are lining up to bring his life story to the big screen.

So, before Willard disappears to Hollywood or some fancy tax haven, I want to meet the man himself and to look around the art world's tiniest studio.

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Arriving at his rented Birmingham digs, though, no one would accuse him of letting fame go to his head.

"Sorry about the mess," he says, as he steers me past the small kitchen to the other downstairs room. "Have a seat, er, there."

The room is filled with bits of remote-controlled helicopters.

"Look at this," he says and a toy chopper that could take out your eye starts buzzing round the room.

He switches consoles and fires up his latest gadget, a remote-controlled dragonfly, which takes off and promptly crashes into the wall.

"There is a child in all of us," he tells me as he puts down his toys and turns to the story of his life.

"I always say that failure was my friend," he says with pride rather than self-pity. "I learned nothing at school, so I just lived in my own world."

Willard's parents left Jamaica in the Fifties for jobs in Birmingham where they raised ten children.

An undiagnosed dyslexic, he always struggled at school and says that his teachers singled him out for mockery.

"It wasn't easy being black and not being able to read or write in Birmingham in the Sixties. But the racism didn't bother me so much. You don't sense it so much when you're a kid."

Skiving off from school one day, he was hiding in the family shed when he became fascinated by the antics of some ants.

"My mum encouraged me to make a little house for them, using little splinters and bits of plastic," he recalls.

"It went from an ant house to a whole ant estate. I don't think the ants were that grateful because I had to lure them in with grains of sugar."

At the same time, he was discovering a talent for sculpting, not that he let anyone know.

"I didn't show them what I could do at school do because I didn't want them to make fun of me," he says.

"I just used to sit there testing my patience, balancing a ball bearing on my finger for three hours, that sort of thing.

"And when I got home, I'd spend hours carving film characters such as Oliver Twist on a cocktail stick."

After leaving school, Willard worked in a factory, while sculpting pieces of all sizes in private.

But his capacity for stillness led to a new career: in the Eighties he became a shop dummy for a local branch of Topshop.

"I could stand still for hours and then dance,"' he says, suddenly launching into a robotic mime routine which would give a professional mime artist a run for his money.

Did he ever think of drama or dance school? "Never. I couldn't go to any place where I would have to read or write. I used to carry round a bandage to put over my hand if I had to fill in a form."

Aged 35, he spotted an empty unit in a Birmingham shopping centre and asked the manager if he could use it to work on a large lump of wood.

Over the next few weeks, gawped at by passers-by, he carved a striking bust of William Shakespeare ("I couldn't read his stuff but I'd seen pictures of him").

A man offered him £500 for the piece and a reporter from the local paper came to write up this quirky story.

"We were talking about my work and then I showed him some of the small stuff I'd done - a ballerina on a pinhead, Prince Charles on a cocktail stick, that kind of stuff. It just blew him away."

Word spread and, in due course, Willard started earning a respectable sum. The wider world started to take notice.

While exhibiting in Bath, he won a new admirer in the Marquess of Bath, owner of Longleat.

"I like the Marquess a lot - he's like Father Christmas - and I did a sculpture of him.

He said to me: "I may be a lord but I'm a totally different kind of lord."

"I can relate to that. He even introduced me to some of his wifelets."

While Willard was not actively selling his work, the offers kept rising - from four figures to five.

A few years ago, someone offered him £18,000 for what he still regards as the toughest piece he has made - a string quartet, sitting on a pinhead, with real strings made from a spider's web.

At the same time, he accepted a bid of £17,000 for his Statue of Liberty in the eye of a needle.

Pieces like that are now worth ten times more.

His subjects range from the classical - Rodin's Thinker sitting on a pin - to the contemporary - Oprah Winfrey in the eye of a needle and the Beckham family carved on a single cocktail stick.

His tiniest piece to date is a Scottish terrier standing on the point of an acupuncture needle; while his next project is to create a Little Red Riding Hood so small she could be gobbled up not just by a wolf but by a flea.

Money, Willard, insists, is not a driving force. He has a girlfriend - "she's always trying to tidy up the place"(no vacuuming, one hopes) - but lives alone and has few expensive tastes beyond remote-controlled helicopters.

He says he is not even interested in flying a real helicopter. Home, for now at least, is this rented two-up, two-down in a West Midlands cul- de- sac, plus a room in Jersey which he borrows when he wants to get away from everything.

"I do own some property somewhere and the people who manage my money are renting it out," he says, already bored by the subject.

"What I want is for people to appreciate what I do, to enjoy it and say: 'Wow!'."

As I leave, he says earnestly: "It's very nice of you to take an interest in my work, it really is. Do you really like it?"

For all his success, there is still something of that lonely, troubled schoolboy, hiding away with his ants and his toothpicks, craving appreciation from somewhere. Well, he certainly has it now and he deserves every last penny.

So what is Willard's ultimate ambition? "One day, I am going to do the Queen in her Coronation Coach with all the horses, too." And why not? If you're going to think small, then think big.