Making a piece of art smaller than a pinhead is a lot like life itself.
Just ask microsculpture artist Marie Cohydon, 50, whose miniaturized creations taught her “to avoid believing that you have absolute control of the situation”—especially being the mother of an autistic child. “I had to deal with my son’s autism, an ordeal for which I was not prepared and which caused many battles in the face of screaming, stress, and sleepless nights,” she told The Epoch Times. “I think microsculpture saved me from despair.”
The furniture designer and contemporary jewelry maker from eastern France started sculpting her tiny artworks about 10 years ago after buying a microscope. And the rest was history. “I found myself under my microscope in the evening, my eyes riveted on the tiny object,” she said. “I observed that my heart rate was decelerating and that my mind was traveling, I felt a change of scenery, like an aerial view of things.
“One evening, I decided to sculpt a red plastic rod which was lying on my desk, it became a car, type Porsche … it measured one millimeter.”
It wasn’t quite perfect. But she was hooked.
Using dried glue, plastic, silver thread, aluminum, wood chips, graphite, paper, human hair, brush bristles, sewing needles, and watercolor paint, she crafts microscopic swallows, toucans, magpies, and other birds—because her son loves birds—as well as micro houses, trees, dogs, furniture, and even tiny dragons. “It takes me between three weeks and two months, sometimes five months if the scene is big,” she said.
At this scale, all the little pieces tend to fly away and you can’t measure anything, said Marie. You cannot glue properly and the tiny objects tend to repel each other like dust. Among the many challenges is painting the objects with a 000 brush, applying an insignificant trace of paint that dries very, very quickly. “Accept that the paint will spoil everything at the end of the race, and that everything must be completely regretted,” she added.
Making her creations has taught Marie a thing or two about life. “You have to be aware that you can lose the object at any time, you must also know how to lose in order to win, start over and over again, and get back in the saddle,” she said. “This is microsculpture, and perhaps also a certain way of life.” When running into a roadblock, withdrawing for a few days can work wonders. “I come back, as if by a miracle, a solution is there,” she added.
Marie is amazed that she has collectors of her work all around the world and one day envisions having her own personal museum and maybe even a school.
