Its 5am and I can’t sleep. I’ve been awake for 2 hours now trying very very hard not to hate Anne Bonnar. Who is Anne Bonnar you may well ask? Until last week I had no idea either, never met the woman, never heard of her and damn well wish I hadn’t. Since she is using my artworks in what I can only assume are her press images, without crediting me, I have found that my work by association with her is being dragged through the mud which is currently being flung at her by the British media.

The image which is causing me all the grief is one of her posing smugly in front of the triptych of screen prints, “RGB” which I made for the Signals in the City Exhibition at the Hannah McClure Centre. She is photographed in the quintessential way that one poses an artist in front of their work. Except that it is NOT her work, she is not even an artist and the real artist has NOT been credited. The image is striking and the reason why is my artworks! The composition follows the rule of thirds, which clearly shows consideration and focus on the artworks These are not random somethings floating around in the background where Anne Bonar is the focus. The whole image has been constructed to take into consideration the very nature of the artworks and as a result they take up more of the image than Anne Bonnar does.

I've made an image gallery in the exploited! section of my site to show more examples of it in the print media that people have sent me, but I have been told there are others, both in print and online. God only knows what else is being said in close proximity to my work!!

I contacted the gallery and this image was not authorised. In fact photoshoots like this in galleries are never allowed for the very fact that they violate copyright law, which is exactly what this image does. I did not agree to this reproduction of my work, and certainly not in the way that it is currently being reproduced without any acknowledgement to me or the work that went into creating the pieces. I would like to know how much money did the photrographer make from this image? Did he sell it to a press database or is he collecting royalties? Or is Anne Bonar slipping it in all her publicity packs that she sends out? Whatever the case, I am being exploited here.

So, who is this Anne Bonnar? Well she is someone who Creative Scotland commissioned to write a report on how to improve the arts in Scotland, and was paid £120,000 to do so. The furore is that the report which has finally come to light is only 3 pages long and basically says nothing. As a consequence there has been a spate of articles about her shafting Creative Scotland for her three pages of “pure rhetoric and fankly a piece of crap” as the Times so eloquently puts it. The horror of it all is that this bad press is circulating with an image of my artworks attached to it, which considering my artworks are a triptych makes it look like my artworks are being called crap!!!!!

There are no words to express my anger. I don’t even know where to start trying to right this wrong that has been done to me. I am livid at being dragged into something that has nothing to do with me, and that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot barge pole! Anne Bonnar is supposed to be someone advocating the arts and not only does she take advantage of a fledgling arts body, but she is also exploiting an unsuspecting innocent artist. She has said that there should be a priority “To Make Scotland a place where creative people choose to live and work”. What? So we can be exploited by her, have our artworks insulted, and careers damaged?

Effectively this is what she has done to me! I received no funding to produce this work, I have a meagre income for which I work very hard, but which still puts me below the poverty line. So whilst Anne Bonnar swans around with her £120,000 for telling everyone how to make things better for artists, the artists are struggling (as always) and there is one artist in particular for whom she has made things a whole lot worse. The widespread use of that image is detrimentatal to me on a number of levels:

Copyright – The reproduction of my work without permission is a violation of this, nor am I at all pleased about the prospect of image banks having my artworks as their stock images without permission or credit. I don't know how many times it has been cited online, which then opens the floodgates wide open for a whole lot more copyright issues for I certainly have not approved online distribution. And again I raise the question, how much money is the photographer making from this image? A damn sight more than me, I can bet, yet without the artworks there would be no image! Not to mention it is highly irresponsible and unproffesional of the picture editors working for newspapers involved not to properly fact check the image. I don't care what deadlines they have - they should check that copyright has been properly cleared, and if the picture desk misses it, an editor should be questioning why the artist whose work has been featured isn't being credited.... or, worse still, did they think the works were Anne Bonar's, as the composition implies, and therefore didn't need to seek copyright clearance?

Intellectual Property – the works are part of my phd, they are a proof of concept for ongoing research, so whilst I am happy to have them in a gallery space and work with the gallery’s publicity people, I did not endorse the shoot, and so am very concerned about any ramifications it may have on my credibility as an artist- researcher and ultimately on my phd in terms of presenting papers etc about the works if their first “publication” is this horror!

Funding Applications – These works are part of my portfolio that I have just used for recent (and now bound to fail) funding applications. What if a panel member sees the images in the press and then in my portfolio? At worst it will look like I am lying about what I have created. You can see my work in progress as I created the works in the studio, and also what they looked like in the gallery without Anne Bonar and her defensive pose. At best, I can imagine that it will look like I endorse someone who is taking advantage of the very people I need money from, so this whole scenario has seriously jeopardized my funding applications and very livliehood.

Integrity of the Artworks - These are experiments with QR-codes, which have been manipulated to test the latitude of phonecameras being able to read them, and to make the shapes more organic and less clinical and computer generated. “Red” and “Blue” have reproduced to the quality of being able to scan the codes with a mobile phone straight from the newspaper articles to the hidden content. This is not meant to happen, people should not be able to get to the hidden content from a newspaper article! Whenever I have sent people images of these for publicity I change/ blur the codes so that they can not be scanned and read. Part of the integrity of the works is seeing them in the gallery space. The spaces in which artworks are consumed underpin my whole Phd, so now that they are being consumed in mainstream press with Anne Bonar standing smugly in front of them, their integrity has been destroyed.

Ironically “Blue”’s hidden message is a quote by Walter Benjamin: ““Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”

I’m very very tired and its now 6am on a dark wintery morning in Scotland; I’ve lost 3 hrs sleep this morning and its not the first time sleep has been lost over this issue. I should have been sleeping, not worrying and writing about Anne Bonnar or irresponsible picture editors, who have all probably just had a wonderful nights' sleep! I resent my artworks being dragged into a situation which until they were used, had nothing to do with me or my art.