Ostia Fieldwork & Studies

Harry’s reason for visiting Ostia was simple: to spend time in a place where an ancient city could still be felt as structure rather than spectacle. What mattered was not the isolated monument, but the larger rhythm of the site, walls, roads, pillars, thresholds, fragments of plaster and pigment, and the way a built world can remain physically present long after the lives that once moved through it have gone.

Ostia offered that with unusual force. Vast, quiet, and unexpectedly spacious, it can still be read as a city rather than a scatter of ruins. Its scale was part of what made the visit so compelling: the long streets, the repeated verticals, the breadth of the walls and the calm between them all seemed to call for a similarly expansive response in paint. On this visit, away from a few school groups, it was possible to walk the streets reflectively and at length, photographing brick patterns, road construction, traces of ochre and wall painting, vertical elements, worn thresholds, and the dusty life of ruined walls under changing light.

There is something reflective, almost metaphysical, in that experience. The bricks remain, but countless lives have passed through them. The streets are still there, but the city they carried has withdrawn. Alongside the beauty of the place lies the thought of labour, hierarchy, and the immense human effort required to build at such scale.

Ostia began as a settlement at the mouth of the Tiber and, over time, became the port city that fed Rome. It grew into a dense working world of warehouses, baths, apartment blocks, temples, workshops, and streets shaped by trade and daily movement. Its decline was slow rather than sudden: as the river silted and the coastline shifted, Ostia lost the position that had once made it indispensable, and the life of the port moved elsewhere. In being left behind, it was also preserved, and later excavations gradually brought the city back into view.

The photographs made there were not intended as souvenirs so much as working notes: close studies of brick bonds, worn edges, fragments of pigment, and repeated structural elements. Again and again, the same qualities returned, ochre remains, brick reds, burnt earth, shadow, dust, and the calm insistence of vertical forms. What emerged was not a picturesque image of antiquity, but a more reflective sense of a city still present in fragments.

The works that begin here remain rooted in Harry’s long stripe practice. Ostia does not replace the Bath studio, nor the long-standing Provence thread in the work. Instead, it offers another field of attention: a darker atmosphere, a slower historical pressure, and a different emotional weather. The black ground, vertical stripe paintings begin in walking, photography, and observation, then return to Bath, where they are tested and translated.

Formally, the new work stays close to the floating stripe structure of Measured Intervals: variable vertical bands held in suspension against the canvas rather than driven fully to its edge. What changes is the register. Black becomes both ground and interval, while the stripes themselves draw on terracotta, burnt red, brown, olive, burnt sienna, and ochre. Against the black, these colours carry a greater sense of depth, heat, shadow, and material weight, while still retaining the clarity and interval-based rhythm that define the work.

Some of that colour still arrives by way of Provence. Harry’s self-made Roussillon ochres carry an established Bath–Provence material thread into this new body of work, so that the paintings hold together two kinds of fieldwork at once: the long pigment memory of Provence, and the archaeological pressure of Ostia.

These are not paintings of Ostia in any descriptive sense. They grow instead from its surfaces, its scale, its emptiness, and the long afterlife of a city still present in fragments. The vertical stripe remains the spine of the work; what Ostia changes is its mood.