Dante - Seeking Immortality

Part of Ho's 2024 Dante cycle, Seeking Immortality engages with a preoccupation that runs through the Divine Comedy: what outlives the body. Dante's journey through the afterlife is itself a meditation on poetic legacy and the long memory of art. As a linocut rather than mokuhanga, the print works through the sharp graphic contrast and matte ink coverage characteristic of the relief block, set down by hand-burnishing or press. Ho's approach to literary subjects typically unfolds across serialised sheets rather than single statements—a method developed through her artists' book practice and her sustained interest in the cycle as a printmaking form. The Dante series fits that mode, treating the medieval text not as a single illustration but as a sequence of meditations on mortality, memory, and the work of the imagination, themes that recur throughout her broader body of work in linocut, mokuhanga, and intaglio.