Working across fields (of study) enriches the soil of each. I have found my own curatorial practice nourished by Karen Barad and Donna Haraway’s cross-disciplinary theory which often looks to optics and physics to approach knowledge making practices.

Haraway, in The Promises of Monsters asks: can phallocratic sight be remade for a ‘still possible socialism, feminism, anti-racism and science?’(1) Physics here is important. The study of light and associated phenomena affects how we see the world - literally and figuratively. Reflection is a process we practice as we ‘reflect on a place’. Barad and Haraway suggest, however, that we step 'out of the phallogocentric, reflective logics of producing the Same […] by acknowledging the differences that exist’. (2) Working across disciplines creates space for us to acknowledge these differences.

I have found slow glass to encourage multidisciplinary working. Its subatomic structure is described throughout Shaw’s writing, and thus the material inspires me to think about physics and the material’s working processes. Turning to Barad and Haraway is an ethical approach to this, and I have learnt much from their, often entwined, study.

Multi-disciplinary working also encouraged me to take time to better understand my practice by observing or carrying out experiments myself. Seeing the world through a glass prism, for example, made me think about what is hidden to us, entangled beneath our - selective - vision.

From seemingly incongruous spaces, an ethical artistic-curatorial practice can grow. Borders are porous, and we become open to a multitude of different ways of viewing practice. This is not an exclusionary curatorial method, but an accommodating one.