There are probably easier things to build than Hell.

But once I had read Dante’s Inferno, made my notes and divided his enormous journey into its individual circles, I had another problem:

How was I actually going to make it?

This wasn't going to be a series of straightforward paintings. I wanted Dante's descent to become physical—to move from one sculptural piece to another, taking the viewer from Mount Delectable, through the Gates of Hell and gradually down through the nine circles until we reached the centre.

That meant painting, sculpting, cutting, constructing and working with different materials to give each part of Hell its own identity, while somehow making all the individual pieces belong to the same journey.

And I needed people.

Lots of them.

Dante populated Hell with an extraordinary collection of tortured souls, monsters, demons and sinners, and I wanted real human bodies behind many of the figures I painted. That particular problem would eventually take me from volunteers at my local gym to a naturist campsite in Tauranga — but we'll get to that.

This gallery is the story behind the finished artwork: the sketches,  materials, experiments and construction that gradually turned words on a page into my own three-dimensional interpretation of Hell.

This is how I built Dante’s Inferno.