Contemporary art – you mean unmade beds, sharks in formaldehyde, surely?

Craft techniques? That'll be your Women's Institutes, church fetes and the like.

Sheffield's latest exhibition smashes these two worlds together to create something new and extraordinary.

The Victoria and Albert Museum joined forces with the Crafts Council to come up with the appropriately named Out of the Ordinary exhibition last year.

The exhibition was staged at the V&A and since then has toured various venues around the country. From today, audiences in Yorkshire will be able to see the exhibition at the Sheffield Museum's Millennium Gallery.

The exhibition brings together the work of eight contemporary artists who place craft at the heart of their practice: Olu Amoda, Catherine Bertola, Annie Cattrell, Susan Collis, Naomi Filmer, Lu Shengzhong, Yoshihiro Suda and Anne Wilson.

The artists come from around the world, from the UK, America, Nigeria, China and Japan.

Collectively these artists use a diverse range of traditional and new technologies, from carving, sewing, welding to animation and laser etching. Working with exceptional skill and attention to detail, they use ordinary materials – paper, thread, dust and nails – to make works that are both intricate and large in scale.

All the artists are preoccupied with the everyday as a subject. Mundane or familiar things, like a paint splatter on a dust sheet, a human breath or a weed pushing up through a crack, are presented in playful and unexpected ways.

Together, these eight artists suggest new directions for the handmade in the 21st century. They have found ways to transform the ordinary into artworks that are truly extraordinary.

Scottish artist Annie Cattrell laser-etches clouds inside solid blocks of glass and uses traditional lamp-work techniques to create a fragile glass sculpture representing the breath trapped inside a human lung. Lu Shengzhong, Professor of Folk Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, uses traditional paper-cutting techniques to create large-scale installations of cascading red paper, consisting of thousands of tiny hand-cut figures, evoking the imagery of traditional Chinese
folk art.

Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda makes precise carvings of life-like weeds and plants, revealing the stark beauty in simple, often overlooked things.

Annie Cattrell trained as a sculptor and has a studio in London. Her work captures moments in time, fleeting things, clouds on a particular day, a breath inside a human lung. Her subjects stem from her interest in areas such as neuroscience, anatomy and meteorology, and she is drawn to the fusion between science and art.

"I work quite closely with scientists to create my work. I like the idea of working quite closely with the world of science on something such as the lung sculpture and then represent it as a piece
of art," says Cattrell.

"My work is about taking something that can be thought of as quite mundane, looking at it analytically and representing it to show just how extraordinary the world is.

"The cloud glass sculpture is a great example of that. I worked quite closely with a meteorologist to find just the right cloud to represent. I didn't want something that was extraordinary like a tornado or a storm cloud, just a cloud that looked quite ordinary, like something that anyone would be able to see anywhere in the world. I think that's an amazing idea.

"When the show was at the V&A, they would come out of the exhibition and you would see them looking up at the clouds."

In a new commission for Museums Sheffield, Catherine Bertola will create a floor-based work in response to objects found in the museum's metalwork collection. Finding inspiration in the Parish pattern cutlery designed in Sheffield, Bertola will create an intricate carpet of metal pins which carefully recreates these familiar designs in a playful new context.

This commission will go on display alongside Bertola's series of drawings, Bluestockings, and work produced especially for Out of the Ordinary by Olu Amoda, Susan Collis, Naomi Filmer and Anne Wilson.