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::ANDREA INNOCENT::
::BIO::
Previously working within a broad range disciplines including fashion design, textile design, animation and character design, it was after studying her Masters of Multimedia Design and subsequent travel to Japan, where she lived for three years, that Innocentgirl (Andrea Innocent) chose to tell her stories of the bizarre and quirky through detailed digital illustration, her current work is an ongoing exploration, in a contemporary context, of aspects of Japanese popular culture from an Australian perspective. Innocent girl traverses imaginative worlds from manga and the idiosyncrasies of otaku to folklore and reality TV in search of the eccentric stories that populate her work.
A self-confessed nipponophile there is no denying the influence her exposure to Japanese culture has had on her work. Themes range from investigations into the cult of otaku to traditional Japanese folk tales and Japanese textiles and their meanings. Her inspirations can come from various sources such as newspaper articles, Japanese television, and advertising, books, music, toys, animals, the Internet, or just from watching life unfold around her, both imagined and real.
Heavy in symbolism the illustrations fuse contemporary art and socio-political comment with traditional works. Aesthetically the works borrow heavily from the traditions of ukiyo-e, manga and subsequent contemporary styles such as ‘Superflat’, Steampunk and Neo-Nihonga. Combining a strong sense of colour and graphics and blending these with ‘found’ photographic and textural images her works become a collage of icons that tell a story and seek to entice a sense of curiosity from the viewer.
Her website, www.otoshimono.org (otoshimono meaning lost and found in
Japanese) is a metaphor for her own mind. She seeks to share her images
and stories, although they are frequently lost and be found as innocentgirl moves in a
head space between Australia and Japan, between past and present. She
coalesces traditional and modern narratives into which mirrors her process
in that hand-drawn images are scanned and built upon using software inside
a computer, they are often then returned to the ‘real’ world
in the form of digital prints on paper. It has been remarked that her
pieces tend to float between both a Western and an Eastern art aesthetic.
Innocentgirl says “Let’s be making Happy Pictures!”
::Education::
2003 Masters of Multimedia Design_Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
1993 Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design_RMIT, Melbourne, Australia.
