Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Places (8 Photos)

November 13, 2026

By Vidar

Familiar objects in unexpected places

A clothespin pinches a hillside, a window stands without a house, a fork rises from a lake, and a tap pours water from midair. These eight artworks take familiar objects out of their usual surroundings.

More: Sculptures That Blend With Nature

🪟 “Window with Ladder – Too Late for Help” — By Leandro Erlich

A ladder reaches a brick wall with no house attached. The wall seems to hang above the ground. The New Orleans Museum of Art lists a 2008 version of Leandro Erlich’s work in its sculpture garden.

🚰 Floating Tap — El Puerto de Santa María, Spain 🇪🇸

A tap pours water while apparently floating in midair. A pipe hidden inside the stream supports the tap and supplies the water.

📷 Photo by Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0; converted to WebP).

🪵 “Skin 2” — By Mehmet Ali Uysal in Belgium 🇧🇪

A wooden clothespin appears to grip a fold of lawn. Mehmet Ali Uysal’s gallery dates Skin 2 to 2010; the familiar object makes the ground look soft enough to pinch.

💡 Park Fact: The clothespin was built for the Festival of the Five Seasons in Chaudfontaine Park, near Liège. Atlas Obscura notes that Uysal, born in Mersin in 1976, teaches art at Middle East Technical University, and that by 2022 the sculpture was no longer in the park.

🍞 An Oversized Toaster — By Tom Bob

Two black slots turn a green utility housing into a toaster. Its painted cord curls across the pavement, ending in a plug.

More: Tom Bob’s clever street art on SAU

🔗 Follow Tom Bob on Instagram

🎣 “Shiny Objects” — By Naomi Haverland in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA 🇺🇸

Five fishing lures appear to hang against the tower at Kern’s Bakery; even their shadows are painted. Naomi Haverland created the mural for the SoKno Rail Trail & Art Walk, drawing on East Tennessee’s fishing culture.

🔗 Follow Naomi Haverland on Instagram

🫖 “Chinatown Market” — By Yip Yew Chong in Singapore 🇸🇬

Tea pours from a huge teapot into cups suspended between real windows. Yip Yew Chong painted the three-story gable at 30 Temple Street as part of his Dreams of Chinatown series, recalling the neighborhood he knew in the 1970s and 1980s.

💡 Artist Fact: Yip spent more than 25 years as a professional accountant and painted murals on weekends for three years. ACCA’s Accounting and Business magazine reports that he became a full-time artist in 2018, when his younger child started university.

More: Yip Yew Chong’s Chinatown murals on SAU

🔗 Visit Yip Yew Chong’s website

🍒 “Spoonbridge and Cherry” — By Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 🇺🇸

A spoon arches over a pond, carrying a cherry too big for any bowl of fruit. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen made the sculpture in 1985–1988 from aluminum, stainless steel and paint.

📷 Photo by Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress, LC-DIG-highsm-12674 (public domain).

🍴 “La Fourchette” — By Jean-Pierre Zaugg in Vevey, Switzerland 🇨🇭

An eight-meter stainless-steel fork stands in Lake Geneva, beyond the people relaxing on the shore. Jean-Pierre Zaugg designed it for the Alimentarium’s tenth anniversary in 1995; Georges Favre fabricated it.

💡 History Fact: The fork did not stay at first. Atlas Obscura records that it moved to a garden in Littau, near Lucerne, in 1996, came back to Vevey in 2007 for an exhibition on cutlery, and was then kept for good.

📷 Photo by Markus Schweizer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0; resized).