Queen and Country needs you (From The Northern Echo)

Queen and Country needs you

11:45am Friday 20th March 2009

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I SUPPOSE there are few things more private than your memories. All of us have places, faces, sights and sounds that have a purely personal significance: try and explain what they mean to you to someone else and all you’ll get is a puzzled shrug.

But memories can work on a different level.

Alongside personal memories are events that touched us as a nation or a community – remembering where we were when John F Kennedy or Princess Diana died.

It is not often that these two aspects of memory, the personal and public, come together, but they do in a moving and noble way in an exhibition being held at mima, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

It is the Queen and Country artwork, by the official war artist Steve McQueen, that commemorates British servicemen and women killed in Iraq. It is on display until May 3, so please go along and see it.

I think it is modern art at its best in that it is simple, innovative and also tells a story.

It consists of a large oak cabinet with vertical drawers containing a series of facsimile postage stamp sheets. Each sheet is dedicated to a fallen member of the Armed Forces and features a photographic portrait chosen by their family. McQueen is hoping that the Royal Mail will issue the stamps, as only then will he regard his work as complete.

The exhibition is all about courage. Firstly, of course, the courage of the people, and they are predominantly young people, who died. But it is also about the courage of their families, who – through the artwork – share their personal memories with us.

Every photograph in the exhibition has a special significance for these families and by displaying them in this public way they are allowing us into their lives, giving an appreciation of their loss and the sacrifice sons, daughters, wives and husbands have made.

It reminds us they are not statistics, names on the six o’clock news briefly heard and quickly forgotten. They were individual, real people who were doing a horrifically dangerous job with courage, dignity and humanity.

They worked, fought and died for us all. They and the people who are still doing that job in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere deserve our respect and our thanks.

Queen and Country is not like other pieces of public commemorative art, such as the Cenotaph, which are formal, stark even.

They are the product of a more reserved society often uncomfortable about expressing emotions. We’re different now. But it is a work of great integrity and one I am sure will stand the test of time. It will help people understand the sacrifices service people and their families have made, and will always do.

In a couple of weeks time I will be meeting some of the families whose loved ones feature in Queen and Country. I can’t pretend that I know what they have been through, what they are still going through, because their loss is enduring. But having seen this artwork I think I understand it just a little more. So, hopefully, I will be able to express our thanks and sympathy a little better.

So please, go and see Queen and Country.

You might be asked to sign a petition organised by the Art Fund urging the Royal Mail to issue the stamps. You can also do this online at www.artfund.org/queenandcountry Please think about doing this. Most conflicts, most wars are caused by misunderstanding as much as evil. If we learn and understand more about the reality of war, then it may be that fewer people will have to make the same sacrifice as the fine men and women who speak to us from these portraits.

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