In her exhibition Container, installed at Wexford County Hall, thirty discarded wardrobes were transformed into three towering sculptures. At once familiar and uncanny, they invited us to look again at the objects that surround us and ask what traces of history, memory, and responsibility they might carry. The work was part of House on the Beach, a Creative Climate Action project led by Trinity College Dublin with Wexford County Council, which brought art and community together to spark new conversations about rising seas, erosion, and how we imagine our shared future.

Your current work Container (a chapter of the larger project House on the Beach with Trinity College) was an exhibition exploring our relationship to the climate crisis using familiar domestic objects. What could people expect to see at the exhibition?

The exhibition centred on three 5.5-metre-high forms, ‘spectres’ fabricated from discarded wardrobes. I sourced the furniture online for little or no cost, since so-called “brown furniture” is unfashionable at present. Their surfaces were treated with fire, transforming them into a silvery charcoal black.

I chose wardrobes because they are close to our own scale. They hold clothing – objects that are intimate, proximate to the body – so the human is always implicated. I am also interested in how we perceive nature and time, which is invariably through the lens of culture. The burning process stripped away the glossy veneers, exposing both an “archaeology of production” and the raw grain of the trees from which the wardrobes were made.

This process almost immortalised the wood: it halted woodworm activity, rendered the structures water and fire-resistant, and slowed decay. Their silvery-black surface is visible carbon – the very carbon absorbed by trees as they grew, it was “breathed in” and held across decades (bypassing the Anthropocene in some cases) then released under fire into charcoal-encrusted graphite. This graphite surface carries a leaden sheen, an industrial lustre that shifts with the light so the work appears to hover. Art Deco mahogany – now a listed species – revealed a tiger-like pattern under the duress of heat, while chipboard takes on the look of granite. Each wood’s provenance and history contend with the external form it once carried in its object-life. This material is deeply entangled with human culture as a medium of communication.

Charcoal was first pulled from firepits to make cave drawings; graphite was mass-produced in the nineteenth century as the pencil, the universal tool for transmitting and remembering ideas; and graphene, graphite at a single atom’s thickness, is now poised to replace silicon in quantum semiconductors. Through these trajectories, the work became an exploration of time – biological, cultural, and technological. The wardrobes themselves embody temporal depth: their average age is seventy years, with some reaching one hundred and seventy. There are thirty in total. Once installed in a bedroom, a wardrobe rarely shifts; it settles, almost as if taking root. Gathered together, these thirty pieces of furniture have collectively stood sentinel for some 2,500 years, quietly witnessing sleeping and dreaming. As Gaston Bachelard reminds us in The Poetics of Space, the wardrobe, like the house itself, is not merely functional but psychic: it harbours intimacy, secrecy, the oneiric life of objects.

And sleep is important. It’s no longer something we can take for granted. In our age of acceleration, anxiety, and endless artificial light, sleep and dreaming are under real pressure. We place preservation orders on forests, coastlines, and wetlands because they are fragile and need protection – but maybe we should start thinking the same way about our internal landscapes. Sleep and dreams are just as vulnerable, and just as vital. They might even hold pathways out of our current deadlock, routes into other ways of imagining and living. At first glance, the three towers might seem to have stepped out of a fairytale – the ‘witch and the wardrobe’ has already been suggested – and this proves a productive route into the work. Where rational logic has failed in addressing our environmental crisis, perhaps it is the untamed force of imagination, allied to dream, that must now be granted authority.

The work also leaned into the eco-gothic, attempting to make visible what is usually repressed or held within. At first encounter, it looked like walls of closed doors, and you might wonder what’s hidden inside. For me, that mirrors our haunted condition: the weight of past ecological damage and the constant dread of a future closed off by climate collapse. These lingering anxieties don’t disappear – they hang around, pressing on us, often leaving us paralysed. The real horror, though, is scale. The destruction we face is so vast it’s almost impossible to relate to. It becomes the elephant in the room – something too big to grasp, so we look away. With House on the Beach, and again with Container, I’ve tried to work with familiar scales and recognisable objects to bring us closer to this trauma, to give it some form. These pieces act as stand-ins for thoughts and feelings that we usually repress. We tell ourselves it’s too big, that what we do doesn’t matter – but that avoidance only makes the anxiety grow. It expands in what I think of as a communal shadow space, a shared psychic architecture where ecological phantoms circulate.

The three could also be read as architectural, anything from toppled dolmens to medieval houses to stacked monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They could be lighthouses or broken industrial chimneys. Architecture is symbolic of our collective culture, and in our current existential worry, we only consider our own survival, our children and future generations, but what could be overlooked is the crowd of our ancestors, the sediment of countless, faceless multitudes that came before us, all will disappear. No monument will remain to honour any. Essentially, they form an assembly of archetypes, brought together within the container of a government building to deliberate on something vital. Each figure carries a symbolic role, representing different ways of knowing and being, yet they share the same space, facing the same questions. This gathering reflects a key theme of the work: the need for dialogue across disciplines, perspectives, and worldviews. It points to the importance of engaging in “outside the box” thinking – stepping beyond familiar frameworks in order to address the complex challenges we face.

Along with the exhibition were a series of curated conversations about climate topics that took place in various locations across Wexford county from Rosslare Harbour to Kilmore Quay. How important do you think it is for people to be immersed in the coastal environment when engaging with topics like climate change and tidal erosion?

So we brought a wooden dining table and chairs to the beach for the ‘Talks on the Tide’ series. The kitchen table is where conversations happen inside homes. Ours were also charred, and so are sealed from the elements. In alchemical traditions, fire is both an ending and a beginning – it strips things back to their essence and makes renewal possible. I hope to borrow this sensibility and lend it to new ways of talking about what we can do together to make meaningful changes. Here, the ocean wasn’t a concept, but a presence, the incoming tide was literally invited to the table.

Beaches are liminal or marginal spaces. They create a cultural margin which allows for the transgression of normal social rules and boundaries. The shifting sands where we have our talks mediate between the fluid ocean and the solid earth. I see the land as quite fixed in its social bond – attitudes can be rigid and immovable – and so the sea-side with its proximity to the intangible vast ocean creates a ‘changed register of expectations’…This unsettled quality made it easier to break out of normal thought patterns and imagine new possibilities. By holding climate talks here, we hoped to borrow those qualities – risk, creativity, heightened attention – and bring them into the dialogue. And locally, of course, the coast is not just symbolic but the actual site of change and loss, so being here rooted the conversation where it mattered most. People often say they’ll go for a walk on the beach ‘to clear their heads’. I think it’s a great place for people to ‘change their minds’.

You are both a climate activist and world-record holding freediver, how has your work in each field informed each other?

The environmental disaster is not only happening in the external world, it’s also happening inside our bodies, mentally emotionally and physically. Eco-anxiety, climate despair, and toxin exposures build up in our bodies. We used to think of ourselves as closed-off single entities, but we realise now how entangled we are in our environment; we are symbionts – so it’s important to be aware of how our bodies and minds interact with the world on multiple levels, and be conscious about what we absorb.

Climate activism includes personal activism; looking after yourself builds the resilience needed to sustain engagement with the larger climate movement. Freediving is a research activity that connects me directly to both myself and my environment. You are radically alone underwater, being able to trust yourself and control your nervous system is critical, so for a ‘successful’ dive you must completely surrender yourself to the water. On the descent, as you release the tensions that belong to the land, an expansive sea-mind floods in…

The body becomes the primary instrument of sense, echoing Shusterman’s idea of somaesthetics, where knowledge begins in the lived body rather than abstract thought. This unsettles the boundaries between human, animal, and the water itself. What comes are only partial glimpses, yet they point to forms of sensation that transcend species and hint at modes of life not bound to breath. As you release the tensions and worries that belong to the land, the sea-mind rushes in. This unsettles the boundaries between human, animal, and nature – the body can feel beyond species and it’s clearly capable of life beyond breath. Altogether the practice is a form of re-enchantment, filling me with awe and creating a genuine synergy with the water. This heightened connection creates an empathy with, and an implicit responsibility to act on its behalf.

The mind seems to stretch out into the vast liquid space around you. Altogether the practice is a form of re-enchantment, filling me with awe and creating a genuine synergy with the water. This heightened connection creates an empathy with, and an implicit responsibility to act on its behalf.

Free diving breaks apart our usual worldviews and the frameworks that shape everyday reality. Underwater, the linear sense of time disappears – you have to let it go, because clinging to time brings stress, and stress ends the dive. In that suspended state, free diving becomes a reset: when I return to land, I carry the conviction that there are always other ways of being, and new ways to think through the climate crisis are possible – we just need to seek them out.

 Through Container and the wider House on the Beach project, Nina McGowan highlights how art can translate the vastness of the climate crisis into forms we can see, feel, and talk about. The wardrobes, the tide, and the act of diving deep all become ways of reminding us that we are bound up with our environment, in our histories as much as in our futures. By creating space for dialogue, imagination, and re-enchantment, McGowan’s work reflects Creative Ireland’s belief in the power of creativity to connect people, spark new ways of thinking, and help communities face change with resilience and care.