Ciccone has demonstrated an extraordinary memory for these collections (which remain unlabelled and yet are perfectly organised and accessible for him) and an ability to recall the names of individual persons met briefly, over periods stretching many years.

This ability has been noted as a key component of his artwork, informing the connections he draws between figures of public life and popular culture, and the attention to detail in his technical execution.

During this time he produced artworks centred on the actions and heroics of Australian Rules Football players, one of which has been acquired for the permanent collection of the National Sports Museum.

Glenn Barkley, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, has described Ciccone’s “obsessive engagement” with television and mass media presentations of sporting events as being a quintessential trait of his generation, stating that for “Generation X,” there is “little difference between what we might watch and how we might feel.”[2] He notes the manner in which Ciccone democratises his subjects, describing an oeuvre of works in which “cathedrals are as important as the corner of a studio and lions lie with mice, and elephants, and koala bears.” However, Barkley is careful to point out that Ciccone’s works are not flippant; he attributes his use of low-brow televisual imagery to a project which elevates and finds meaning in banal aspects of contemporary life, claiming that he “celebrates the mundane, the disposable and finds it beautiful.”[2] Stylistically, Ciccone’s rendering of mass media personages and events in soft, layered pastel, work towards this elevation of his subject, transforming the “flatness of newsprint or flickering image on the screen” into something “warm and personal.”[2] Although best known for his works in pastel on paper, Ciccone has worked in a range of mediums including painting, printmaking, ceramics and digital animation.

However, in recent years his work has also achieved success in more conventional art institutions and has been acquired for major permanent collections at the National Gallery of Australia (Print Archive) and MADMusée, Liège, Belgium.