Erin HyerJohn Haddock

Intermedia Practices Artist StatementAll 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 noth-ing 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 at-tended 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 chal-lenge 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 ex-cited 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 Bat-man 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 possi-ble. 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 on-line and people that do impressive similar work with cardboard is Mike Leavitt who has done ex-act 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.