Little Things Mean a Lot to Sculptor

Wearing a lacy skirt and holding up an umbrella, the slender girl gracefully rocks a shapely leg, her elegant shoe barely hooked to a tiny toe. All the while, she perches--on the nose of a mosquito.

This micro statue, made of pure gold, is so small that the veins on the life-size mosquito’s wings can be seen clearly only with the help of a strong microscope.

It’s not work for the easily distracted or someone with anything but rock-steady hands.

“When I make my miniatures, I try to hold my breath and touch the work with the instrument between the beats of my heart to prevent my hand from trembling,” says Nikolai Syadristy, a 64-year-old Ukrainian who crafts some of the tiniest art in the world.

A museum containing his works is in the Orthodox Christian Monastery of the Caves, a 12th century holy place in the center of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, where golden cupolas rise above whitewashed walls and church bells peal. Another Syadristy museum is in Andorra, the tiny state in the Pyrenees, while a third is to open soon in Barcelona.

Visitors to the Kiev museum can see a 0.15-inch model of the Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’ sailing ship, composed of 256 gold parts. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince stands just 0.03 inch tall, on a pearl planet with a 0.08-inch airplane nearby.

There’s also a miniature book of verses by Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko--12 pages of poetry and pictures bound with a spider web. The book can fit through the eye of a needle.

He doesn’t sell the works, preferring to see them displayed in collections. He lives off his salary from the Kiev museum, which is financed by the state.

Born into a family of farmers in eastern Ukraine in 1937, Syadristy studied art and agriculture, and he worked as an engineer at the Kiev Institute of Superhard Materials. Long interested in Chinese, Indian and Japanese miniatures, and punctilious by nature, he set himself the task of making things ever more delicate--such as the flea on which he put little golden boots, one of his first miniature works.

Syadristy has created about 100 miniatures with instruments he made himself.

“It’s infernal work, considering the fact that very often it has taken more time to make an instrument than to process a part with it,” he says. “Moreover, every new piece needs a new set of instruments.”

At first it took Syadristy a whole year to create one or two miniatures. Now it takes him nearly a month of painstaking work to create one piece--whether it’s baby swallows inside a nest made of half a poppy seed, or a red rose on a green stem 0.002 inch thick, inside a human hair that has been polished so thoroughly that the flower can be clearly seen through it.

Visitors to the Museum of Microminiatures, which Syadristy founded in 1977, view the works through microscopes mounted on the white walls of the Baroque building.

One case features a minuscule electrical clockwork mechanism inside a dragonfly’s head. It consists of 130 parts, including gears, ruby bearings and two human hairs that form the hour and minute hands. Another electrical motor is one-twentieth the size of a poppy seed.

Creating miniatures is “poetry embodied by technical means,” Syadristy says. “A miniature is a way of poeticizing small forms.”