Nina McGowan is a Dublin-born artist and professional freediver (World Record / World Champion 2022) whose practice spans sculptural installation, speculative design, and performance. The body is always central to her work.Her practice explores the physical negotiation of solid and...
Read MoreNina McGowan is a Dublin-born artist and professional freediver (World Record / World Champion 2022) whose practice spans sculptural installation, speculative design, and performance. The body is always central to her work.
Her practice explores the physical negotiation of solid and liquid, land and sea — and the threshold states that emerge between them. This extends to the limits of consciousness encountered in deep freediving (explored in her CCI Gallery show, Jan 2024); sleep as the last refuge from capitalism; and the penetration of artificial light into the body as a perpetual leash to the system (Pineal Centrifuge.beta, 2018–19).
Earlier works examined the body in relation to the screen and the idea of "visioneering" — how mid-20th-century science fiction generated a faith in the future so powerful it is now becoming reality, brought into being by the generation that grew up inside it (Tie Fighters, 2005; multiple works with art-activist collective Loitering Theatre, 2012–2018). Most recently, Container (2025) — a large-scale sculptural installation developed in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin and the Creative Ireland Climate Action Fund — was shown at Wexford County Council Building.
It is the body that fundamentally experiences the world. McGowan's work stems from a commitment to improving the quality of her own perception, and using that as a vehicle to generate new awareness of, and sensitivity and empathy toward, our shared domain. Her aim is to reset the intimate, connected relationship with the physical world that we risk losing — a practice framed through ideas of solastalgia, transcendence, and the eco-gothic.
