Andrea Innocent is currently residing in Melbourne, Australia but she began her career by exploring aspects of Asian culture. "I was on a one way train to illustration from the beginning only I read the map wrong and took the fashion and animation lines … luckily I found the connection somewhere in Tokyo and got back on track. It was around 2004 that I first began putting together storyboards that never made it to animations due to time constraints. They became ‘single frame animations’ which is just a fancy way of saying ‘illustrations’ really."
About her fascination about Japanese culture, she explains: "I grew up in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne where there were a lot of Asian immigrants moving in at the time, so most of my friends were from China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Japan. I would go to their houses and watch anime and read manga, we would draw and create our own characters on our schoolbooks and collect all sorts of ‘fancy goods’ and stationary.
The Asian aesthetic feels natural to me, in fact even when I lived in Japan I never really felt any ‘culture shock’".
The Asian aesthetic feels natural to me, in fact even when I lived in Japan I never really felt any ‘culture shock’".
She combines 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. "I would describe my work as a mixture of eclectic imagery, informative trivia, hidden meanings using stories both real and imaginary to describe a world that is much less organized in my own head whilst giving me an outlet for some socio-political issues that I feel need to be expressed".
