An artist is furious that a studio where she worked for nine years allegedly sold pieces of paint-spattered carpet as her genuine work.
Angelique Hartigan has taken legal advice claiming her reputation could be damaged after her name was put to her spills on the flooring. Ms Hartigan painted at the Gipsy Hill workshop in Crystal Palace until May when she moved to set up her own gallery in Malden, Essex.
She said she was horrified in July when friends told her they had seen the workshop, a co-operative, selling off pieces of carpet as her work.
“I paint on the floor and I use drips and spills and throw the paint and I’m well known in south London as an artist,” she said. “There was some kind of yard sale at the Gipsy Hill studio, after I left, and some people I knew saw it and said ‘what’s this and why has Angelique made this?’ They didn’t know what was going on because my name was on it.
“I sent an email immediately to say ‘what are you doing? You didn’t ask me, stop doing this’ and ‘write to the people you have sold them to and find out where they are. I want all the pieces back because I don’t want them out there’.
"I was so incredibly shocked when I saw it. I felt sick and I could not sleep that night. I felt violently and physically sick and betrayed by these people I had known for nine years. But the people at the studio say they haven’t done anything wrong but I feel my rights have been infringed and my reputation had been possibly damaged.”
A member of the Gipsy Hill co-operative was contacted by the Evening Standard about Ms Hartigan’s allegations but has refused to comment other than to deny them “entirely”. Her barrister, Mark Engleman, head of intellectual property at Hardwicke Chambers, said the row could raise issues of copyright, false attribution and whether the carpet was Ms Hartigan’s “intellectual creation”.
“Angelique’s carpet was created entirely by accident,” he said. “But if there is no copyright there are no moral rights because, whilst far from clear, the law seemingly, at first glance, only confers moral rights. This includes the right to prevent false attribution to a work.
"Miss Hartigan’s reputation could be saved by the right to prevent false attribution to works not of her creation. This is because false attributers might well be liable in respect of ‘artistic works’.”
