6. The State – Richard Hamilton, 1993
The late Biritsh Artist Richard Hamilton made three diptych paintings relating to the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The Citizen, 1981-3, depicts a blanketman, a republican detainee at the Maze Prison. Blanketmen, in protest at their non-political status, refused to wear prison-issue clothing or obey prison regulations and lived in their own squalor. The Subject, 1988-90, represents a parading loyalist Orangeman, and The State, 1993, which shows a British soldier on patrol in Northern Ireland, expressing the unease of the army’s equivocal position between the two warring groups in Northern Ireland. The soldier is at once gun-wielding and defensive. Hamilton wanted to create the effect of the soldier walking backwards. It is a customary practice for British soldiers patrolling in Northern Ireland to walk back to back, some 100 yards apart, to ensure that they are covered in both directions. This idea also relates to the artist’s perception that the British wish to get out of Northern Ireland. The artist represents the soldier as a young and reluctant, a ‘conscript’.