t moments of unrest I open Instagram and scroll impatiently until I see what I need to see, and then I exhale, a gleeful loosening. What I am looking for is something recognisable – a plant, a pencil, a chair, a bowl of dumplings – shrunk to a fraction of its size. How to describe the pleasure, the sweet, squealy pleasure of studying a miniature iPhone, suitable only for a busy mouse, or smoked salmon bagel that would fit on the head of a pin, or a set of tools balanced on a fingernail? My favourites are the miniatures that are truly banal – a plug extension lead on @DailyMini recently thrilled me, as did a rack of postcards showing scenes from holidays appropriate only for ants. In those moments of tightening stress, when the world feels far too large, I have plenty to choose from. The world of tiny things is growing. Artists sculpting miniature objects have found new audiences on Instagram and clients on Etsy – a recent purchase of mine on eBay was a gutted fish on a plate, at 1/12th its real size. I am also watching a pack of crumpets. Once the stuff of elderly hobbyists, over the past decade miniature making among millennials has seen a boom. The queen of the miniacs is Carmen Mazarrasa, whose tiny rooms, filled with covetable things, make the viewer feel wobbly, both at the scale and their desire. Because it’s not just that the rooms of rugs or ceramics or beds look real, it’s that they look like rooms you might see in Architectural Digest, filled with artful paintings and replicas of iconic chairs. A typical post will catch your eye with its lusciously lit scene of a living room appearing recently vacated by beautiful and cultured people whose corduroy couch and midcentury paintings tell a story of art and pleasure. Then suddenly, a giant hand will appear through the ceiling and place a hyacinth in a vase. These are not your average doll’s houses. “I make ideal miniature spaces that contain every obsession I possess,” Mazarrasa tells me from Madrid. By making them she learns about technique, perception, scale, visual tricks, living spaces and also “human nature”. She began as a child. Every time her family moved house, she would arrange miniature furniture in a shoebox or drawer while her mother moved their real furniture around the house. At 20, while studying jewellery design, she moved in with her artist boyfriend (and “musicians, philosophers and a couple of terrorists, but that’s a different story”) and set up a doll’s house in his studio. When she started working on it, she realised she was “trying to work out everything that was wrong with my actual life. It became a project that allowed me to control very uncontrollable circumstances.” She became pregnant at 22, and started to picture a house for her child. “All through my pregnancy I put a lot of work into this house that I imagined in Trastevere [Rome], full of futurist art and designer furniture that I made and re-made, often tearing off the roof. I made my baby a teenage room, giving us around 15 years there.” One day her boyfriend’s gallerist came for a studio visit and saw the house, its tiny terrace, its uncanny beauty, and soon her work was being exhibited, elevated from therapeutic hobby to art. Two years ago she quit her day job, spending half her time running the family farm (“We make very good Spanish jamón and olive oil”) and the rest on her miniatures, occasionally making the odd piece of bespoke jewellery. A typical piece starts with the opening of her drawers of “precariously categorised materials” until she sees a pattern that suits her mood. “Sometimes it takes days or weeks of trying pieces of fabric, paint samples and moving furniture around before I can start to see what I’m doing.” Then she starts to build. “There’s carpentry, painting, electrical work, upholstery, sewing, embroidering, clay, metal and glass-making, porcelain, oil painting and also hoarding and repurposing odd bits and pieces of metal and plastic, fabrics, samples, beads, nuts and bolts, plants and little bits of food. I spend a lot of time making sure things weigh enough so that they sit right.” She makes everything by hand, “except the odd toilet. At first it was really a question of me not liking the furniture that I found in shops, but now I’ve developed so many different technical capabilities that it’s a challenge that keeps on getting more and more interesting.” The other challenge, of course, “is knowing when to stop”. It was when she was organising a jewel exhibition in an archaeological museum, working with Egyptian miniature scenes made of clay and wood that had been buried with the mummies, that she realised how ingrained our love of tiny things is. “There is an element in human nature that is fascinated by things taken out of their natural scale. Be it big or small, the very action of changing their scale makes them symbolic and at the same time renders them useless. They make your brain leap a little to try to fit it into its predetermined categories.” But for Mazarrasa, there is also the joy of building things. “And making wishes come true. Whatever I want, it’s there at the reach of my hand.” One day, soon after the first exhibition, she took the tiny house to her parents’ farm in the south of Spain and set up a workshop. She started redecorating an old childhood doll’s house there over the summer, then as autumn came, covered the two pieces with sheets and moved to London. “Now, one of the obsessions I have is that there are stairs connecting every floor, and that pillows and soft furniture weigh enough so that it feels like it’s sitting right. For this purpose I used to fill them with cotton and couscous to give it heft.” An email arrived some weeks later, with a series of photographs – the houses had been destroyed. Mice had moved in. “The floor was covered in tiny poops, the soft furniture was hollowed, the hard ones were gnawed at, everything was moved around – incredibly, some furniture had even climbed one or two floors up, while other pieces had been pushed out through the windows. They had made nests in the beds and given birth in some of them.” Years of work, destroyed. “It was quite devastating. It came at a time when it was all falling apart – it definitely served as a symbol.” And yet, the photos were not only upsetting. “They were also beautiful. It was such a wild, bacchanalic rave that they’d had, and it was so clear that the question of scale had played into their enthusiasm. In the end I was sorry I hadn’t seen them doing it through a little peephole.”