Yeah, I’m from Melbourne, but my grandparents are Italian, hence the surname.

Just boredom, to be honest. I was pretty sick of living in Australia and I came to Paris in 2009 for a vacation and kind of fell in love with the place, so I never left.

I never went to art school or anything like that, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been making things and creating images. So in a very real sense, all of the things that I do now have their genesis in my childhood, in one form or other. I was always a bit of a loner. I preferred to be home, locked away in my bedroom making things and watching movies, so that’s what I did. Then, when I was a teenager, I started making these kind of fucked up, little art zines and getting involved in the zine community a little bit. These eventually fed into making the collage-type artworks that I still create now.

I’m really into things that have a strong, palpable mood, and I like creating work that gives me an emotional charge. I view my artworks as interior landscapes, so I have to be in a really specific state to make them. With my film and video work, I always have several things in progress at once, but with the still images, I don’t actually create work very often. It’s not unusual that there will be months or even a year or so when I won’t make a new piece at all. I try to do that kind of work only when I feel a real urge. Then, it usually flows out very quickly and I make a whole bunch of work in a very short period of time.

I feel like childhood is this really rich and complicated period of our lives, yet for some reason, it’s often represented in the most shallow way. It’s weird because it’s like skimming the top off a lake that runs thousands of miles deep. People tend to idealize childhood and take all the complexity and mystery out of it, but that’s where its beauty and power reside. The inner lives of children are super rich and it’s kind of amazing the way everything takes on this gargantuan quality. Everything’s bigger, scarier, more vivid, more intense. Everything’s immediate and blown up, magnified. It’s a totally unique period in our lives, and in my work, I try to allow all of that oversized emotion and complexity to be present.

People see my work and assume that I had this terrible, traumatic childhood, but I’m not just picking my own scabs. Yes, my work is very personal, but I don’t think it’s quite as simplistic as that.

’d love to be able to make some smart, grand statement about why I do things the way I do, but to be honest, it’s really just all instinctive. I feel like I’m always looking for something very particular, but something also very difficult for me to articulate in words. On the most direct level, I can say I enjoy seeing particular types of images of children alongside destroyed houses and landscapes. I’m particularly into tornadoes. I’m not sure why it excites me and gives me a charge, but it does. I try not to unpack it.

Yes.

I don’t really like speaking too much about what things are about, but yes, I am apologizing to someone in particular in that series and it’s very sincere.

I never really think about it. I make my work primarily for myself. People seem to respond pretty strongly to my work, on both sides of the spectrum. I think that, for a lot of people who don’t like it, it provokes feelings that they would prefer to not engage with, which is fine. It’s definitely not for everyone.

Kiddiepunk originally started as a zine and then slowly morphed into a small press over time. We publish books and zines that are mostly centred on the theme of childhood or youth in some way. I tend to think of it as one big, tightly curated art project. The focus and aesthetic are consistent with the themes of my artwork, so I view it a little bit like an extension of that.

People still love and buy printed works. Looking at things on the Internet and looking at a book are two separate things. In regards to Kiddiepunk, I think the people that would have been excited by these types of things twenty or thirty years ago are still the same kind of people that are excited by them now. The advantage of the Internet is that it allows you to reach people that you wouldn’t otherwise, so that’s cool. You generally can’t buy Kiddiepunk releases in bookstores, we only sell through our website, so the Internet is a friend. There’s room for everything to co-exist I think.

Mostly books – I’m really into books and bookstores.

I discovered zines when I was a teenager and I was really into punk and Riot Grrl zines at first – those were my gateway into the whole zine world. Everything about them excited me, from the making to the way they look, to the way they are disseminated out into the world. As far as reaching a specific audience or creating a community, I feel like that’s what I’ve been able to do with Kiddiepunk. I always felt there was never really a place for what I was and what I wanted to see, so I kind of made one myself. Maybe that sounds a bit corny or whatever, but it’s true.