Erin Hyer was always considered an outcast as a child who preferred staying inside and playing video games with her brother to interacting with other children. As a student, she struggled to pay attention in class and could only focus on art projects for long periods. She moved over 1600 miles from her small hometown of Bismarck, North Dakota to attend Arizona State University where she has been exposed to new possibilities in art. For a class project, she created life-sized Lego figures of Batman and The Joker out of cardboard to practice scaling up designs. She hopes to continue perfecting her Lego sculptures and is inspired by other cardboard artists like Mike Leavitt and Chris Gilmour who make detailed replicas of everyday objects.

1. Erin Hyer
John Haddock
Intermedia Practices Artist Statement
All my life I have been considered an outcast. I showed signs of it when I was little and
an example of it would be the fact that there were other children in my neighborhood and I
would always prefer to stay inside, mess around with my brother, and play a Pokemon video
game with him in our basement. Most of the time, children were forced to play with me because
their parents made them to try and see if they would become my friend. It never worked. Around
my brother, I was perfectly fine, but, whenever I had to go to school, I would sit in the back of
the class doodling and doing anything but paying attention to the teacher.
Aside from being socially awkward, I can never sit still during a lecture. I would either
start falling asleep or play with something or browse the internet. The only thing I can sit down
and do for hours is an art project. As a student in art, even now I am not sure what direction I am
trying to take my art career. I suppose that is part of the reason why I moved more than sixteen
hundred miles away from home.
I am from a small city known as Bismarck, North Dakota and as you might have guessed,
there is not a lot going for North Dakota up until recently. To me, that means that there is
nothing professionally I could have learned in this place I was living in. As well as loving art, I
loved to explore and be with family, which made Arizona a perfect choice. For the year that I
have attended school here at ASU, I have been welcomed to so many new possibilities and sides
to art that it is honestly overwhelming. It makes becoming an artist more challenging, but it is a
challenge I am excited to take on. Why be an artist? To be called a professional in something I
love to do and eventually be paid for it. There are many different ways that I could go and I am
excited to continue my journey here for the next three years to figure out what exactly it is that I
want to do as an artist.
In one of my more recent pieces, I made two five foot tall lego men. One of them is
Batman and the other is his arch nemeses, Joker. Joker was the first I made and it was for my 2D
Design class which assigned a ‘scale-up’ project where you had to take something and either
scale it up or scale it down. I took a lego man’s size and made a five foot tall lego Batman and
Joker. What I hoped to accomplish was making them look as close to their lego version as
possible. I believe there is a bit I could work on like getting the head arms and legs exactly right.
Making lego men is something I plan to continue doing and perfect more and more as I go on.
To be quite honest, I do not normally look into other artists. My work is usually the only
one that concerns me and I am quite content with most of the things I do. I did however look
online and people that do impressive similar work with cardboard is Mike Leavitt who has done
exact replicas of pairs of Michael Jordan shoes. Another artist is Chris Gilmour who takes things
from people’s every day lives and makes them only out of cardboard and glue. An example of
his work is a car he made out of cardboard and glue. It has amazing detail like windshield wipers
and the engine itself. It is detailed work that I can only hope to accomplish while work towards
my goals at school.