3 February
–
23 April 2006
Section
3: Gender, Race and SocietyRichard Hamilton b. 1922
The citizen 1981-3
© Richard Hamilton 2002. All rights reserved, DACS
This work was inspired by a 1980 TV documentary on the 'dirty protest' by republican prisoners at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. Demanding to be recognised as political prisoners, inmates refused to wash or wear regulation clothing and smeared their cells with excrement. When this tactic failed the protest developed into a mass hunger strike. Hamilton said the image was 'shocking less for its scatological content than for its potency… the materialisation of Christian martyrdom'. The title is the nick-name of a Fenian bar-fly in James Joyce's Ulysses. The Fenians were devoted to the liberation of Ireland.
