Container
Container is a three-part sculptural installation of thirty charred wardrobes, each approximately eighty years old — witnesses to sleep, standing for decades in bedrooms across generations.
Much of the wood absorbed its carbon before the second industrial revolution, sealed inside once the trees were felled and made into furniture. Using yakisugi, the Japanese technique of timber charring, McGowan forces that long-held carbon to the surface — burning the wood until it appears as a charcoal-black, graphite-like skin.
The same process makes the wood water-repellent and resistant to rot: a demonstrated method of resisting decay, not a metaphor. These wardrobes were being discarded when McGowan intervened and saved them; charring makes that rescue permanent. Arriving in a city that lives daily with the rising tide, the towers stand as objects that have already made their peace with water.
At its heart, Container questions our relationship to materials — what we extract from the earth to furnish a life, and what we owe the things we've already taken. Climate destruction operates at a scale that resists comprehension, too vast and slow to properly grasp, easily looked away from. Container returns it to human scale: thirty wardrobes, stacked into towers, hold more than wood — decades of clothing and possessions, multiplied across a household, a generation, a society, brought close enough to sit with. Container is built to hold more than it appears to.
Each wardrobe holds an internal shadow space, the dark interior where imagination lives during sleep — reinforced and sealed by the charring. Collectively, the wardrobes represent twenty-five hundred years of accumulated time standing vigil in bedrooms, often the last objects to leave a house when a life ended.
Where logic has failed us in our response to climate change, imagination must be given its chance — radical, dreamt, not reasoned. Container stands as a place where that dreaming might begin.
