A walk down a churchyard path, passing other memorials and plaques, can be an important, meditative time for bereaved relatives. But some have had an unpleasant surprise when they find that the carefully chosen design and inscription on the headstone they have come to visit has been copied elsewhere.
“When a design is copied, it is not just your design but your time and your creativity that is stolen,” said Teucer Wilson, a master stone carver. “You can try to see it as a compliment to your work in a way, of course, but it can be very upsetting for the family that you originally worked with.”
Seeing a gravestone as a work of art, protected by copyright, is often hard for those who are making a significant and emotional decision about how to commemorate a life. But for the craftspeople who make a living by designing and carving stones on commission, it is a growing concern.
Wilson has experienced a string of recent incidents that appear to have disregarded his copyright. “I made a memorial in Ireland that was very personal because the design, a swirling interlocking knot, was based on a ring that the daughter had been given by her deceased mother. The headstone I made was a bit like a giant pebble on the ground. It went into a cemetery in Kilkenny and then, only two months later, a blatant copy appeared nearby in the graveyard. The daughter sent me the photo,” he said.
While Wilson accepts that potential clients will occasionally take away one of his draft drawings to have a stone made elsewhere later, he believes he is seeing an increase in direct commercial copying.
Now the Lettering Arts Trust (LAT), based in Ipswich, is coming to the aid of letter cutters and stone carvers by raising awareness of this form of unintended infringement, or even direct plagiarism.
“The main thing we try to do is to raise awareness of the creative side,” said Mark Noad of the LAT. “It is clearly a delicate time; deciding how to summarise somebody’s life in a few words and images. It can take between nine months and a year to complete a stone. So it is hard to find out later, as Teucer has, that your work has been reproduced mechanically. Often it is a quite clear creative abuse and it dilutes the special nature of what was first commissioned.”
Noad compares the experience of working with a bespoke lettering expert to the difference between shopping at a farmers’ market or at a large supermarket. “If you go to a high street monumental mason it will be a totally different, off-the-shelf experience,” he said.
The LAT, he explains, hopes to protect and encourage the skills of letter carvers and monumental engravers, as the craft is threatened by technology. Digital copies of designs can now quickly spread around the world.
“I did a tree of life design on a headstone that has been copied in India and China and then appeared online in New Zealand, with an exact copy of the leaves I drew,” said Wilson. “It is annoying and I can get quite cross about it. But there is only so much you can do, even though it is my design. I had spent days drawing, in tribute to this man’s late wife. The New Zealand company did take it off the website, but it has popped up elsewhere since.”
The LAT wants the church dioceses and councils in charge of British graveyards, cemeteries and memorial areas to stem the tide of mass-produced and machine-carved products. The trust provides a link between clients and trained carvers. It supports six workshops across Britain, favours stone quarried in the British Isles, rather than imported black marble, and also takes on apprentices when funds allow.
British commemorative traditions are heavily influenced by convention. The rules followed by British churchyards vary and are open to interpretation. Sometimes there is a ban on a specific shape and sometimes on new vocabulary. For Wilson, it is usually a case of finding a stone colour and carving style that will add something to the environment. All artists’ imaginations, he acknowledges, are fed by what has gone before: “Of course I am influenced too, but to me it is most important to keep my designs fresh.”
