Dante's Inferno

Come With Me to the Centre of Hell

I'd already tackled the Book of Revelation. I'd built Emrys, my Great Welsh Dragon. Apparently that wasn't enough.

I wanted another enormous story to get my teeth into.

I've always been fascinated by biblical stories and by the mythology that surrounds ideas such as Heaven, Hell, sin, punishment and redemption. They're extraordinary subjects for an artist because they're full of imagery, symbolism and uncomfortable questions about human behaviour.

And this time, I wanted to bring Hell to life.

So I began where I usually begin when I'm about to make life unnecessarily difficult for myself.

I read.

I worked my way through Dante's Inferno, making notes as I went. It wasn't an easy read, although after surviving the Book of Revelation, Dante felt positively accommodating.

The difference was description.

Dante gave me landscapes. Creatures. Rivers. Cities. Fire. Ice. Monsters. Souls. Punishments. Architecture. And an actual journey descending deeper and deeper into Hell.

Very quickly I realised there was simply too much for one painting.

So I dissected Hell.

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Building Hell, One Circle at a Time

Instead of trying to squeeze Dante's entire journey into one enormous image, I began dividing it physically into stages.

The journey would start before Hell itself, with Dante and Mount Delectable. Then would come the Gates of Hell and Charon the ferryman, followed by Limbo and the successive circles, each occupying its own sculptural plinth or sharing one where the narrative allowed it.

The structure gradually became:

Mount Delectable → Gates of Hell → Limbo → Circles 2 & 3 → Circles 4 & 5 → Circle 6 → Circle 7 → Circles 8 & 9 and the centre of Hell.

The existing sculpture follows that descent through recognisable encounters including Virgil and the three beasts at Mount Delectable, Charon at the entrance, Minos in the second circle, Cerberus in the third, Pluto in the fourth, the Styx, the City of Dis, the Minotaur and eventually the extraordinary ditches of the eighth circle. 

And as the journey became darker, I wanted the sculpture itself to become increasingly extraordinary.

Eventually it would culminate in those magnificent copper ditches at the centre of the work, surrounded by paintings containing the inhabitants of Dante's Hell. Your existing account already identifies that copper structure as the dominant physical feature of the eighth-circle section. 

There was, however, one fairly obvious problem.

Hell needed people.

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Recruiting Souls for Hell

I didn't want to invent every human pose.

I wanted real bodies.

Some people from my local gym volunteered to pose for me, which gave me a start, but Dante's Hell contains an awful lot of damned souls.

I needed more.

So I contacted a naturist community in Tauranga and asked whether some of them might be willing to become inhabitants of Hell for an artwork.

Happily, they said yes.

I arrived at their campsite to find everyone sitting around perfectly comfortably in hats and jandals — which was quite an introduction.

Then we got to work.

I had them posing in all sorts of positions and scenarios that I could later use throughout the paintings. One gentleman became particularly enthusiastic about his role and started jumping off boxes for me so I could photograph his body in motion.

It was brilliant.

I'd brought wine and beer as a thank-you, and what could potentially have been an extremely awkward afternoon turned into an enormously funny and enjoyable one. By the end of it they even invited me to stay if I wanted to.

I declined the accommodation, but I left with something considerably more useful:

a population for Hell.

And those generous people became part of the work.

When you look closely at the tortured figures scattered throughout my Dante's Inferno, many of those bodies weren't invented. They began with real people who were prepared to twist, crouch, fall, leap and contort themselves for my camera one afternoon in Tauranga.

A lovely bunch of people.

They contributed remarkably well to Hell.