Suzanne Walsh introduces artist and World Champion Freediver Nina McGowan's large-scale sculpture show Container, currently on display at the Wexford County Council buildings.
Featuring three 5.4m towers from discarded wardrobes—antique mahogany to mid-20th-century chipboard. Once bedroom sentinels, they mirror human scale amid capitalist decay & ecological loss. Charred, their graphite sheen reveals pre-industrial carbon, a silvery breath from past forests, hinting at immortality. From cave charcoal to quantum tech, this graphite, (a tool for remembering and communicating outside of the constraints of language) asks for cross-disciplinary dialogue... for where logic has failed us, perhaps imagination should be given authority.
Imagine the wardrobe in your childhood bedroom, at night. Or imagine a child in a bedroom at night who can't sleep because the door to their wardrobe is open a little. That faint crack of an open door is distracting, maybe even faintly unsettling. Perhaps a mirror on the inside shows light slowly fading into another world. Or they can see the faint outline of a piece of clothing on a hanger. The hanging clothes can’t help but evoke a figure, a ghost or monster. The wardrobe exudes a presence, scaring the child though in the daytime it seems harmless, an everyday thing. There is space within that dark gap for a thought to grow, a fear, a shadow. A structure built to contain human garments, the selves which are slipped off every day, lives inside a larger structure built to house humans. The wardrobe at night speaks of the uncanniness of these boxes we dwell with and within.
The wardrobes used in Nina McGowan’s Container are themselves in a state of transformation – their unlikely fusion, with surfaces torched silvery black. Are they stretching upwards in a gesture of hope or are the tower-like structures precarious, and in danger of toppling, heralding their own destruction, Babel-like? Our own dwellings have an inbuilt feeling of security and safety in them, but in the face of climate change, which McGowan refers to in this work, we can’t rely on their protection alone, anymore.
We have long explored our fears through storytelling, most recently our fears of the end of the world in sci-fi and disaster novels and films. In the recent film, 28 Years Later, (Danny Boyle, 2025), survivors are trying to live in a quarantined Great Britain, where society has collapsed due to 'the infected', zombie-like aggressors who hunt humans. This 'Rage’ infection has come from lab experiments, a warning, perhaps, of our hubris in scientific and technological experimentation. The survivors use a dwindling pool of useful objects from the past, and new generations are ignorant of once ubiquitous technology and knowledge, instead living in a neotraditional hunter-gatherer society. In one scene, two of the main characters, father and son, Jamie and Spike, take shelter in the attic of an abandoned house. They are safe, briefly, from the infected, until the house literally falls apart around them. The old structures cannot help them anymore. But another character, the reclusive Doctor Kelson, makes elaborate towers from the bones of the dead, the infected and uninfected alike. These are ‘memento mori’, a reminder of the inevitability of death, and how to face it, but also a call to cherish life while we can. We can all be struck down by disaster, small or large at any time, and it can be unfathomable – flooding, drought, or hurricanes. We watch films like this feeling somewhat secure that this is, for now, happening in another version of our world, but the reality is creeping ever closer, and for some, it’s already here.
The most famous wardrobe in fiction is perhaps the one in the children’s novel The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis, from The Chronicles of Narnia series. The novel explores ideas that Lewis proposed – if another world existed that needed redemption, what form would it take? This is in keeping with Lewis’s own Christian theological concerns and interests (1966). But earlier, before the novels, he was already thinking about wardrobes, when encountering poetry which inspired him – the writing itself was a portal to a more altered state.
‘I did not in the least feel that I was getting in more quantity or better quality, a pleasure I had already known. It was more as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides.’(Lewis, 1946).
Language here shifts from the usage of everyday life into something sublime. Like a wardrobe becoming the doorway to another world or stretching itself into a new life as part of a towering sculpture. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the magical wardrobe is kept in the spare room, full of unused coats. These layers can be felt as Lucy, the first of the children to journey to Narnia, moves through it. We change clothes so much, in our current age, for ‘clothes still maketh the man’, (or person). Living under contemporary capitalism, Western people, invariably, buy clothes often made in sweatshops by people in the east and global south - clothes that don’t even last. We can have quantity, but quality is still hard to obtain. The siren call comes from the possibility of being someone more if we buy the right garment. Spending money on comfort items is a way to temporarily ease the pain of bills, poor housing, or healthcare, the cracks in our society, and now also the anxiety of the future of our world. What was once carefully contained in chests made of scented wood, or wardrobes hung with herbs to safeguard from moths and decay, is now moldering on heaps of rubbish in less fortunate countries.
The sea is rising, the ice is melting, houses are in danger of falling into the sea, or are being swept away by floods. On the east coast of Ireland, in Wexford, at Sea View and Ballyhealy, houses and land are in particular danger from coastal erosion (Kane, 2024). The local council, and landowners themselves, have tried placing rock protection measures, but the growing storms hitting the coast can’t be slowed. The sea levels rising from climate change is another contributor. The soft coast of East Ireland is losing a half a metre per year, and possibly more. Local novelist Colm Toibín writes about houses in danger on the coast, particularly in The Blackwatership Lighthouse (1999). In this novel, the Devereux family gather in their grandmother’s old house which is situated precariously on a crumbling seaside cliff in Blackwater, County Wexford. The family wonder when it will eventually fall into the sea. They gather to try and resolve their past estrangement, to heal resentments, and to nurse a family member. Declan is dying from AIDS, and his slow and tragic decline is echoed in the erosion of the land, his life seems to be disappearing like the sand that pours down the cliff.
‘Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea.’ (Toibín, 1999)
At night, wardrobes in our bedrooms watch us sleep; it’s said you should not be reflected by a mirror when sleeping in case your spirit is taken. McGowan says we are ‘sleepwalking to climate change disaster’, and also that it’s always artists that are called upon to ‘raise awareness’, when they often live precariously. It’s true that artists donate works or perform for fundraisers, and they often work with local communities to archive or resurrect their culture. But also many individuals and communities are increasingly active environmentally, raising awareness of biodiversity or cleaning beaches. However, we can only do so much when governments and large corporations hold the ultimate power to change. Those that must feel the most frustration with our current situation, and complacency, are the environmentalists and scientists studying climate change, who must feel like Cassandra of Troy, condemned to see the future but not to be believed, or to be believed but for people to ignore it. In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the philosopher talks about the human aspect of existing within the peaceful geometry of the house. ‘The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ But what if we need to urgently wake up?
‘Early 14c., warde-robe, "room or large closet where wearing apparel is kept," earlier "a private chamber" (c. 1300), from Old North French warderobe, wardereube (Old French garderobe) "dressing-room, place where garments are kept," from warder "to keep, guard…"’ (Harpur, 2025)
The etymology of wardrobes, which comes from keeping and guarding. Our ego is guarded when we are in the unconscious world, when we are asleep. Who are we in the dark, when we’re not performing ourselves? We hang up our everyday selves with our clothing. We sink into the world of the unconscious, to experience everything that in the daytime we are not. McGowan commented that when we sleep we can’t make or spend money for the capitalist world. But already there’s some peeling back at the corners of this escape, as companies who make sleeping apps harvest their customers’ data. McGowan’s Container could be seen as a guard against the coming environmental challenges, but simultaneously as a fragile edifice that can never survive, as vulnerable as we are. McGowan spoke about the history of the wardrobes, representing many generations of users, stretching back in time. She was concerned about the idea of generational knowledge that could be lost, swept away, if we are not careful. This sentiment serves as a reminder that each old wardrobe had, possibly, been sold because its owner is now dead. Bringing it out of its house, one last time, as mourners carry out a coffin. One box for the garments of the living self, and one for the dead.
While constructing the sculptures, McGowan mentioned her admiration for the neo-classical details on some of the wardrobes, and the world this evokes. The Greco-Roman world of Eleusinian Mysteries, initiations under the ground, labyrinths, and the tricks of the Olympian gods. In famous works of literature and mythologies from this era, humans try to survive in a cruel world where their fates are often the playthings of the gods. But now, depending on what we believe, we may need to take responsibility also.
‘The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.’ (Jung, 1957)
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, imagined that instead of believing the gods are in control, that now these impulses come from within, from unconscious urges, often destructive or self-destructive. We are the ones inflicting this reality on ourselves, or allowing those in power to do so. Why can’t we collectively ‘wake up’ and realise the doom that is ahead of us unless we make rapid worldwide change? Is it some kind of self-soothing myopia, or just a fault in our thinking as a species, an unbridled optimism? Or else a sense of hopelessness, which is hard to fault when you think of the world powers that could be using every resource to turn things around are instead fighting futile and cruel wars, developing water-guzzling AI, and ruthlessly continuing to exploit the world. It’s hard to stay envisioned and hopeful. Perhaps we need to continuously seek solutions that are neither naively hopeful nor hopeless but work collectively, and imaginatively together. We must descend into the labyrinth, and initiate ourselves into thinking more deeply and strategically on our future. Works like McGowan’s Container can only ask us to open our minds to these possibilities, to ask questions, to open to other worlds, or to another future for our own world.
Guardians on the Edge - inside artist Nina McGowan's Container
