The smallest animal sculpture is

“Fragile Giant”

Guinness World Records · 2015

0.157 mm high — the size of a speck of dust. A figurative elephant sculpture so small it can only be seen through a scanning electron microscope.

The Fragile Giant nano sculpture next to a human hair, showing its microscopic scale. — 0.157 mm · scale comparison

Fragile Giant — the world's smallest figurative elephant sculpture. — Fragile Giant · captured under SEM

Guinness World Records · 2015

The smallest animal sculpture in the world.

Awarded by Guinness World Records in 2015 — Fragile Giant marks a turning point in figurative sculpture: a work of art crafted at the quantum scale, indistinguishable to the naked eye, yet rich in detail under the lens of a scanning electron microscope.

On exhibition

Museo Internacionale del Barroco — Puebla, Mexico

Fragile Giant is currently on exhibition as part of our solo show at the Museo Internacionale del Barroco.

Visitors at the Nano Barroco exhibition.

A visitor examines a nano sculpture display.

Audience seated for the exhibition opening.

Confiscated elephant tusks at the National Wildlife Property Repository.

Photograph · Kate Brooks / Redux

A sculpture with a message

Endangered elephants.

African elephant populations have fallen from an estimated 12 million a century ago to some 400,000 today. Ivory-seeking poachers killed 100,000 African elephants in just three years. Fragile Giant is a quiet protest at the smallest possible scale.

Cover of the journal Advanced Materials featuring Fragile Giant.

Advanced Materials · Vol 28 · No 9 · March 2016

Cited extensively in academic publications — across both art and science.

Google Scholar Read paper (PDF)

Selected publications

Process · Created using quantum physics

Multiphoton Lithography

Each nano sculpture is built atom by atom in a UV-curing resin, using two-photon absorption to harden material at a single point in three-dimensional space. The result: a figurative elephant smaller than the width of a human hair.

In the studio with Stefan Diller — filming Fragile Giant inside a Scanning Electron Microscope. — In the studio with Stefan Diller · Würzburg, Germany

Ground-breaking film created in a Scanning Electron Microscope

A revolutionary filming technique drawing on the early days of cinema — using stop-frame photography to painstakingly create a moving image of Fragile Giant.

Inside the SEM at high magnification, hundreds of frames of the elephant were captured as a Piezo stage was rotated to a precision below one ten-thousandth of a degree. Each frame can take several minutes — meaning a single second of film can take up to four hours to shoot. All of it achieved with a ground-breaking optical system developed by Stefan Diller in Würzburg, called Nanoflight.Creator — the only system in the world capable of SEM film.

An SEM does not use photons. The wavelength of light is too large to capture details at this scale. Instead, electrons are focused on to the gold-coated elephant, and the rebounds are measured to form a "picture" based on the reflection intensity of those electrons.

Each stop-frame from this film will be minted as an NFT.

Presentation

With a one-of-a-kind microscope.

Fragile Giant is delivered with a bespoke optical "plinth" — a custom-built microscope that allows the collector to view the work at the scale at which it was made.

Through the lens