“I truly believe that art can be born out of anything,” says cut-paper artist Paige Ledom, whose collages look uncannily like paintings from a distance. Her fascination with everyday materials began when she was an undergraduate student studying painting at University of Kansas where, she recalls, a peer once told her that “art cannot be made from Sharpies,” a particularly stinging comment given that Ledom was making art with Sharpies at the time. She says that it “messed with me for a little bit when I left school, and I had to decide, No, I get to decide what good art is.” After she graduated, Ledom spent five years as an elementary school art teacher in Kansas City (where she grew up) teaching her students to make use of the materials at hand—sculpting with cardboard, for example, or painting with acrylics.
The Inside of Every Fridge is a Self-Portrait, 2024, cut-paper art using everyday materials. (Photo courtesy of Paige Ledom.)
At home one day, Ledom found some swatches left over from a recent repaint of her apartment. She cut the swatches into smaller pieces and assembled them into a work that resembled a painting. So began her artistic project of the past three years: using paper she finds around her house to make collages depicting still lives and scenes of her everyday experience, or “portraits of the home,” as she calls them. Ledom begins each work by sketching out the general composition before pasting “any little scrap that looks interesting to me” onto a paper substrate. She finishes by mounting the work onto wood paneling or board. “When I was younger, I used to think that I needed to move to some really cool place, or the coast, to have this big, exciting life,” Ledom says. “And then I realized I needed to be able to find the beauty in these everyday moments. And now, my life is so exciting because I see the color in what would normally be mundane from the outside.”
