I was keen to make work out in the city, gravitating to the river and working on the banks of the Tiber. It is a marginal space and the kind of place artists often find themselves. I cut and punctured my canvasses in contact with the broken masonry scattered along the banks, washed them in the river and carried them back to the school to dry. I was establishing a working relationship with the city connected with what I had seen in the frescoes at Palazzo Massimo and in Ravenna. It was clear to see how art forms from one culture were absorbed and reworked by another. Within a more contemporary context I was awareness of the presence of Henry Moore at the Etruscan Museum in Tarquinia and the American painter Philip Guston was with me at Ostia Antica. I was coming to understand that I was a part of a continuity of artists responding to the past in order to develop new
forms in the present.

— Simon Callery