Insulate With Cake

Insulate With Cake belongs to Ho's 2020 sequence of linocuts responding to lockdown life, in which the routines of confinement—baking, exercising, video-calling—were recorded in compact relief images. The title's pun, swapping the public-health language of insulation for the comfort of cake, characterises the dry humour of her diaristic prints. Lockdown baking became a widely shared cultural marker of the period, and the still life or figure-with-cake composition turns a domestic reaction into a small graphic record. Linocut suits this register: the relief block compresses a domestic scene into clear silhouette and tonal block, making the work readable at small scale and editionable in modest numbers. The print fits within Ho's longer practice of small format observational works produced as personal print diaries, set against her more sustained literary and book-based projects, and reflects her recurring interest in how the body negotiates the rooms it lives in.