[3] Cattapan initially intended to complete postgraduate study in filmmaking after transferring from computer science to RMIT's School of Art however has stated this never happened "because I got right into the painting".

[6] In the corresponding exhibition catalogue Cattapan's artworks are described; "brief moments in a modern metropolis are captured in small detail only to be displaced amongst a melange of information... there is constant movement across the boundaries of figuration and abstraction".

[10] The award, a partnership between Bulgari and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was bestowed upon Cattapan for his artwork titled Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 4 + 5).

[3] Cattapan was interviewed in 2016 on James Ballard's novel The Drowned World stating that after first reading it he understood it as "a very prescient book" which "has stayed with me".

[23] Cattapan elaborated that he interpreted a strong sense of instability in The Drowned World stating that in the book "everything is on the verge of sliding away".

[3]This involvement with the punk rock scene led Cattapan to begin to explore notions of geographical and social territories.

[3] Cattapan's work has been described as taking on a data-scape style and as a crossover between data-visualisation and the visual landscape[24] and he has been noted for his interest in the post-modern city.

Artist and critic John Conomos is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying "His swirling atmospherics suggest the romanticism of Turner's landscapes and Whistler's nocturnes".

In his words:Using an amalgam of local and global environments to test ways of picturing gatherings or mapping territories has been at the heart of my practice.

[26] By using mono-print Drawings in conjunction with digital photographs, Cattapan's Carbon group create an imaginative retelling of events that he witnessed in Timor-Leste.

[27] In 2014, art critic Sasha Grishin described Cattapan's work as "accessible, but simultaneously also mysterious and hinting at a different level of existence".

[29] Eyeline magazine interpreted this as a reaction to the instability of the 21st century and offered multiple different suggestions of the purpose and meaning of this change in technique.