Lauren Gault’s Some Triangular Thoughts marks the first edition of the Slow Glass publication series.

Some Triangular Thoughts sees Lauren Gault continue research into her great-great-great-aunt Martha Craig. Martha Craig was also an explorer, self-taught scientist and wrote the science-fiction tale Men of Mars in 1907. The title Some Triangular Thoughts pays homage to Martha Craig, as the name is taken from a review of a lecture she gave in 1905. In this lecture Craig spoke about the electrons that make up our body, and suggested that it is a crime to die of disease or old age. Instead, said Craig, we should ‘vibrate away.’ (1)

Some Triangular Thoughts also builds on Martha Craig’s theory and writings. Whilst both Gault and Craig share a birthplace of Northern Ireland, their work disperses from this context and travels across both time and space. There are Northern Irish groundings, echoed in the reverberations of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks - ‘In the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dreams’ - for example. These groundings contrast, however, with Craig’s otherworldly writing, as she travels through space, landing on a ‘gloriously beautiful’ planet that is not our own. (2)

A charge, like the electrons that Martha Craig hypothesises exist in our bodies, runs throughout the publication. It surges through Craig and the scientist Michael Levin’s theory on bio-electricity and Gault’s writing on the electricity emitted by deformed cattle horn. This electricity can physically be felt too, as we turn acetate pages charged with static.

The charge felt across the pages of Some Triangular Thoughts has stayed with me. My research into slow glass - the speculative material after which this publication series is named - has often encountered the idea of charging. The glass absorbs - or is charged with - light from a past time which is then released, existing within a present time. For me slow glass’ ability to charge disrupts the linear, and bordered, notion of temporalities that we often subscribe to when thinking about the past.

Charging, in Some Triangular Thoughts, undoes linearity. Martha Craig, described by Gault as an electrical ‘spin out’, surges within the now, in spite of her physical existence in the 1900s. (3) We can think here of Gault’s descriptions of horn too, a material manifestation of memory. Horn is not manifested in a singular motion, but it the material becomings of the cow’s inner processes over time - a past materialised with the now.