I was a migrant to Australia. And I always felt on the outskirts of what was happening, and I didn’t have any roots in this country. ((Certain Things About Home)) I came from a close knit family and community in Italy in a village, to being lost in a big wide country with so much land and a very different culture, and I felt really displaced. ((Story That Is Embedded)) And I’ve wanted in my life to be part of things, and I didn’t feel that way. And so I guess as an artist when I was older, I’ve always tried to see myself not as on the margins looking into society and being able to make judgments and having some kind of vaguely omnipotent kind of view, because I’m so distant. I always see myself as in — I’d like to think of myself as somebody who’s inside a culture looking around, and having a conversation with people around me, and acknowledging that I’m just as affected and often confounded by the things that happen to us.

And I often respond to things that happen in everyday life, quotidian things, and things that I might see on the news, which are very sort of populist. And that’s the sort of material that feeds my work, and it comes from seeing myself as part of a community rather than outside and looking in.