From castles on a beach, to sand castles, to castles engraved in sand grains…

While working on a large-scale project, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz thought about the idea of squeezing a castle into a tiny grain of sand. ‘I used to work in a smaller studio and my work had a certain scale and then I realized that by moving to a larger studio, my work sort of expanded, reaching up to 500 meters in diameter’, Muniz explains. In fact, some of those pieces were so large that they could only be properly seen from a helicopter. Hence, it is ironic that Muniz has created this miniscule micron-sized work of art. According to Munis, it was his meeting with Marcelo Coelho where he was consumed with the simple idea of etching shapes of large, majestic castles into tiny grains of sand. Despite this appearing to be a daunting and almost impossible task, after 4 years of experimentation Marcelo and Vik discovered a method for engraving the sand. Using Camera Lucida, a software that projects what you have in front of yourself as you sketch, he was able to draw the castles more accurately in a much smaller scale. Using this small-scale castle sketch, Marcel used the focused ion beam technique to draw the castles n several grains of sand. Vik explains that, ‘the interesting thing about these kinds of projects is that they connect scientists with artists. We’re all looking for thesame thing: we’re trying to understand the world around us’.

Check out more of Vik Muniz’s incredible works here ! 

Images courtesy of Vik Muniz