Thumbtack Cactus
I don’t know anything about this. The website I got the picture from doesn’t say anything about it.
My googly research didn’t find anything substantive.
So it’s off to the guesses!
It looks like it’s in a gallery, so it’s considered to be art, and not furniture. Art, which means it’s sculpture. And that means it was carved out of granite, since all sculpture is carved out of granite, with the thumbtacks applied liberally at a later date. This implies that it must be in a gallery that is near a quarry, because how else? So I did do some research after all and have determined that it is from a quarry in Indiana. Specifically, the Hardstone Quarry of Jasper, Indiana. Within a 16 mile radius there is 1 museum and 3 art galleries, 2 of which are dedicated to Australian Aboriginal Art (Strange!) while the Museum is the National Museum of Historic Zoological Specimens. That leaves us with the Heatherton Gallery of Fine Arts in Winston, IN which does have a resemblance to the room in the photo. Solved!
