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In 2020 I founded the Slow Glass publication series, thinking about how the material explores shifting boundaries of time and place. This is a way of approaching local spaces a-new and our memories associated with them. As work on the series continued, slow glass began to orientate my curatorial practice.

Working closely in relation to the speculative material, my curatorial research has opened to permeate both temporal and disciplinary borders. Weaving together my curatorial research, is a desire to look outside of patriarchal visions of reflection, progress and linearity. Slow glass encourages an ethical and feminist way of approaching the world instead.

In order to orientate this curatorial practice, I will re-frame slow glass. Originally written in the patriarchal science-fiction canon by Bob Shaw, I wish to re-imagine the glass within a feminist context. This process gives agency back to the glass. The glass is not used as a curatorial tool, but a space that carries and holds multiple stories and times. This process of re-framing is carried out through theory that traverses science-fiction and physics, in particular feminist and queer understandings, which have a common desire to describe reality and its shifting temporal layers.

As a practice that gathers, the research here is not reflected in the Slow Glass publication series, but rather exchanges and influences with my working practices, providing learnings for dealing with shifting temporal and spatial landscapes.

All research held here is important in influencing slow glass as curatorial practice. Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, however, often feels like a guiding light. I have found myself reading the essay several times a week as a way to orientate my writing and centre my practice.

In this essay Le Guin speaks of gathering, and putting things into a carrier, as a feminist act. I think often of the carriers that I use - an ever-increasing stack of notebooks; a ,sadly, ever-present, mobile phone- but in particular I think of a lime green string bag I take almost everywhere with me. I like this bag because space always shifts within it. I can’t remember a time when something didn’t fit within its expandable fabric frame. At the end of a long day carrying, the contents are jumbled, mostly with each other and occasionally with the bag itself, as its permeable threads are the perfect space for headphones that catch.

This bag, in its expandable and permeable form, reminds me of slow glass. Slow glass has been a space for me that constantly gathers. Orientating my practice around this speculative material has allowed me to re-imagine what a curatorial practice can be. It can rupture borders, entangle and continuously grow. There is no point when I can say I have completed it! It moves with me as I research and practice.

And this website too is a carrier - a carrier of which you are now a part.