Thinking about the Three Fates project, I was considering how the individual fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, might somehow reflect the work I’ve been doing over the past year. As I thought about their roles, I realised that there were some interesting connections. Clotho for example, through her spinning yarn and creating life, reflects much of the work I’ve been doing regarding pathways and the coming-into-being (the unliklely, almost impossible coming-into-being) of the individual human. It is interesting that in much of my work and thoughts this year, I have been considering the pathways of our ancestors and visualising those pathways with, amongst other things, string (a tangle of string might represent the impossible pathways of ancestors). Lachesis of course represents the lifespan of the individual, and in the case of my work, the lives of individuals is a recurrent theme, particularly as regards my work on the Holocaust and World War One. Everything to do with life, our physical acts (such as walking) and the everyday, mundane objects which we encounter and which shape it, are represented by her. Atropos, who cuts the thread, is of course death, and I needn’t say how she fits in.
Of course, much of my work deals with memory and Bill Viola’s quote regarding how we have been “living this same moment ever since we were conceived,” and how “it is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights'”, fits in with the ‘action’ of the three fates, who could be said to be dividing a single life into its component memories as well as Life with a capital ‘L’ into its separate lives.