A powerful piece of war art featuring more than a hundred men and women killed in Iraq since 2003 has gone on show in Edinburgh.

Steve McQueen's poignant work, Queen and Country, commemorates 136 personnel, each featured on their own individual stamps and displayed in strips in a large oak cabinet.

Mr McQueen, also the director of Hunger, the film about Bobby Sands, says he will regard the piece as incomplete until the Royal Mail issues editions of the stamps to the public. His stance was supported by relatives of some of the dead soldiers who attended yesterday's opening at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. An online petition with more than 15,000 signitures can be accessed from the exhibition.

The work occupies one room of the gallery and invites visitors to pull out drawers and examine the often-smiling faces of the dead.

Walter and Diane Douglas, left, whose son, right, Lance Corporal Allan Douglas of the Highlanders, became the 99th British serviceman killed in Iraq when he was shot in January 2006, found it “incredibly moving”. “All these young kids have died. We need something, because people forget that they are even out there. Hopefully the Post Office will come round,” said Mrs Douglas, from Aberdeen.

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