Nobody pays much attention to kitchen sponges or garlic cloves. But over the past decade, Korean artist Haegue Yang has gained a reputation for making playful, conceptual artworks using ordinary appliances and objects found in people's homes.

The 40-year-old Ms. Yang impressed critics visiting Korea's pavilion at the Venice Biennial two summers ago by hanging brightly colored venetian blinds throughout the room like a mobile, with metal fans gently swaying them. Ms. Yang's latest works just went up at the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colo., where she recently completed a residency. Earlier this week, she spoke about several works in the show, "The Art and Technique of Folding the Land," which runs through Oct. 9.

'Trustworthies—Masks': When Ms. Yang finished college in Korea and moved to Berlin in 1994, one of the first things she did was open a bank account. She began to notice the ornate patterns that line the insides of envelopes that banks use whenever they're mailing out new passwords or other sensitive information. She's since collected these envelopes by the hundreds and now transforms these liners into abstract paper collages she calls "Trustworthies." The new ones in Aspen also look like tribal masks. A mask "covers things and gives you a new character," she said.

'Can Cosies Pyramid—Spam 240g Gold': Growing up in Korea, Ms. Yang said she watched her grandmother—who lived through the Korean War—hoard foods that could be preserved for a long time, like cans of salted peanuts and Spam. Early during her Aspen residency, she bought 387 cans of Spam and stacked the cans in a pantry-like pyramid, each wrapped in a hand-knit cosy.

'Manteuffelstrasse 112—Single and Solid': "I like that we have a special, unconscious relationship to objects in our domestic lives that have no status of their own but are completely necessary," she said. Case in point: the seven space heaters that dot her apartment in Berlin. During the cold months of her residency, Ms. Yang thought a lot about those heaters and their role in her comforting idea of "home." So she stretched venetian blinds across seven metal box frames built to echo her heaters' dimensions and hung them, knee-high, around the museum in Aspen.

—Kelly Crow