Console window size with Qemu and curses

Question

I am trying to boot an img with qemu and curses but the resulting console is very small. Is there a way to boot into a bigger console.

This is how I run qemu: sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -hda -m 1024 -enable-kvm -curses

I have tried adding the options -vga virtio and -vga std but no change.

The reason I am using -curses is to be able to interact with the Booted image in the same host terminal window as I will be doing so over ssh and it is more convenient than having Qemu start its own window.

Thanks in advance.