The Weight We Carry (8 Photos)

These artworks reveal what a first glance can miss.

A child disappears into stone steps, a steel figure is filled with river rock, and an earthquake transforms a mural about a year after it was painted. Eight public works, each with a story beneath the surface.

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🫥 Invisible Child — UNICEF Campaign by Shanghai Ogilvy & Mather in China 🇨🇳

A boy is body-painted to merge with the stone steps, one of three children camouflaged in different locations for UNICEF’s Invisible Child campaign. The One Show’s 2008 archive says the intervention brought UNICEF an estimated RMB 200,000 in donations within five days. Communication Arts credits Kevin Lee and Fan Ng as creative directors, with Haohui Zhou and Bin Liu as the artists.

More: The Invisibility of Poverty.

💡 Nerd Fact: The campaign’s One Show archive cited UNICEF data estimating that about 1.5 million children were begging in China’s cities at the time, while only 150,000 received any form of assistance.

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👵 Portrait of My Grandparents — By SMUG in Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺

SMUG identifies the couple as his grandparents in his original post. CitiPower commissioned the four-storey mural in collaboration with Juddy Roller, and it was unveiled in June 2016 on the former power station at the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets.

More: 24 Times SMUG Made Walls Look More Real Than Life.

💡 Nerd Fact: The power-station complex began generating electricity in 1894, initially for Melbourne’s street lighting. The Victorian Heritage Database records that it was then one of only four generators in the state and produced half of the electricity generated in Victoria at the time.

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🪨 Cairn — By Celeste Roberge at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, USA 🇺🇸

Hand-selected river rock from the Truckee River fills the anodized-steel figure. TAI Modern documents Cairn as a site-specific work created in 1998 for the Nevada Museum of Art, where it stands at the front entrance. The Weight of Grief is a widely shared interpretation, not the documented title.

More: What We Carry.

💡 Nerd Fact: Cairn continues a series of rock-filled figures Roberge began in the 1980s. TAI Modern’s history of the work says two related female figures, Rising Cairn and Walking Cairn, were modeled on the artist herself.

🔗 Follow Celeste Roberge on Instagram

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☀️ A Swing in the Summer Light — By ATTORREP for Gulìa Urbana in Belsito, Calabria, Italy 🇮🇹

A girl swings above painted rooftops and mountains while an older man watches from a real window. Created for Gulìa Urbana’s 2022 stop in Belsito, the work uses the swing as a metaphor for life—a movement between opposing situations, thoughts, and feelings—as ATTORREP explained. Photo by Iacopo Munno.

More: The Belsito Swing Mural.

💡 Nerd Fact: Gulìa Urbana began in 2012 as Street Art Day in Rogliano and adopted its current name in 2016. The word gulìa means “wish” or “desire” in a southern Italian dialect, according to an interview with project art director Giacomo Marinaro.

🔗 Follow ATTORREP on Instagram

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👁️ Cartford Inn Eye Mural — By My Dog Sighs in Little Eccleston, Lancashire, England 🇬🇧

My Dog Sighs completed this large eye as a commission for The Cartford in April 2018 and documented the finished wall in his original Instagram post. When online commenters later claimed the image was AI-generated, the artist responded that he had photographic evidence from the painting process. A small silhouetted figure appears inside the iris, while teal paint runs down the cracked wall.

More: Eyes That Speak: My Dog Sighs.

💡 Nerd Fact: My Dog Sighs’s eye motif developed from works painted on discarded cans. He had begun using found objects because he could not afford to give away a canvas every week for Free Art Friday, according to a 2021 interview about his practice.

🔗 Follow My Dog Sighs on Instagram

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🪵 Mama Mimi — By Thomas Dambo at Rendezvous Park in Wilson, Wyoming, USA 🇺🇸

Thomas Dambo completed Mama Mimi in 2021 for Jackson Hole Public Art at Rendezvous Park. The official collection record identifies her as Dambo’s 80th troll and lists recycled wood, steel, and driftwood as the materials. One long leg stretches across the pond to a small island, and visitors use it as a walkway.

More by Thomas Dambo: 10 Giant Trolls Hiding in Forests, Lakes and Ruins.

💡 Nerd Fact: R Park occupies a former gravel pit. Dambo and local partners selected the sculpture’s position to avoid the park’s wetlands and areas of concentrated wildlife habitat, according to Jackson Hole Public Art.

🔗 Follow Thomas Dambo on Instagram

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🌈 STIMULUS — By Rasmus Balstrøm in Glasgow, Scotland 🇬🇧

In his original post, Balstrøm titles the work STIMULUS and identifies it as a mural made for Yardworks at SWG3 in Glasgow. SWG3’s festival archive dates the 2022 Yardworks edition to June 18–19. Offset bands of red, green, blue, and yellow fragment the seated figure’s face and hands.

More: STIMULUS in Glasgow.

💡 Nerd Fact: Yardworks began in 2004 as an initiative for street art, graffiti, and design. One of its stated aims is to counter negative perceptions of graffiti by highlighting the creativity and skill behind it and supporting artists.

🔗 Follow Rasmus Balstrøm on Instagram

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✍️ Mural Transformed by the Lorca Earthquake — By Ramón Pérez Sendra in Lorca, Murcia, Spain 🇪🇸

Sendra painted a girl painting the city of Lorca about a year before the 2011 earthquake. In his University of Granada doctoral thesis, he explains that the section representing the city collapsed in the quake, leaving the girl facing the real rubble. The accidental transformation made her appear to be painting the ruined city back into being, and the image spread widely online.

More: The Lorca Mural.

💡 Nerd Fact: Sendra was in Málaga painting a nursery mural when the earthquake struck. He writes in his doctoral thesis that he learned what had happened to the Lorca work when a friend later sent him a Street Art Utopia post.

🔗 Follow Ramón Pérez Sendra on Instagram

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Which one is your favorite?