When I was about 19 I discovered a book on assemblage work at the National Art School Library and it flicked a switch in me. Jannis Kounellis was part of a group called Arte Povera, which just means poor art. A similar thing was happening in America at the same time, with the American Minimalists, which included artists like Rauschenberg using tyres and things like that purely for their aesthetic quality.

We lived in Berlin for three years, and we came back to Sydney sometime in the middle to have a show with Damien Minton. That’s when I saw this work on display at the Art Gallery of NSW. It’s so intimate. It’s a domestic scene, really – the bed, the flame, and the burn marks along the wall. In a small Italian port town near where Kounellis grew up, there’s a graveyard where all the graves have little gas lights burning beside them. These lights are a symbol of new life, and I think the burn marks on the wall in this artwork are echoing that.

On returning to Berlin there was a period where I was waiting to move into a new studio, but we’d visit all these old sites, labs and historical places that you can go and see. There’s all this debris and stuff hanging around. I would assemble things, sometimes paint on them, or I’d just have a bit of chalk in my pocket and I’d draw on them. I’d make my art and take a photograph. It was good to be resourceful and inventive in this way. I didn’t let not having a studio get in the way of making art. You can always make something.

I have two small Tuckson drawings, one a scribbly abstract and the other a figurative work that I paid off over a year. They’re a small piece of the man, of an incredible artist.

What I like about this picture is all the people that it owes a debt to. In the background, he’s indebted to abstract expressionism, and you can see De Kooning there, but in the foreground there’s Picasso, Braque and, particularly, Dubuffet. He’s accomplished that menacing thing Dubuffet does… it’s a very menacing portrait. Tuckson is having a conversation with the artists who have influenced him.

I think that’s what art is, in the end: a long conversation. An artist explores other people’s languages and then makes the journey back to themselves. That’s when a picture is resolved, when you find your way back.

When I was a teenager, my brother and his girlfriend decided to take me to an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales called Body, thinking that it was probably figurative painting or something. It was a Mike Parr retrospective and it blew my mind.

It can take time to process and digest an artist’s work. Mike Parr is so hard core, but underneath there’s always a sensitivity and sophistication. His work is never explicit for the sake of it. He’s constantly reviewing himself and his practice, again and again. Now, as a painter, his work makes complete sense to me – whether it’s performance or sculpture or drawing or photography.

I remember seeing Bronze liars in the contemporary galleries, in front of 12 of his self-portrait etchings. It was the first time I’d seen two-dimensional and three-dimensional works by one artist synthesising in such an honest way. He also sculpted the backs of each of these faces blindfolded, so the expression from the back changes and has an almost braille-like quality.

I do figurative sculpture in steel and plaster. I haven’t shown many, but I will eventually. Right now, I don’t feel the need to let them out of the studio; I like having them around. I find I’m looking at sculpture more and more when I paint and when I think about painting.