Collaboration as Method and Object: A Tattooist–Academic Approach to Copying and Creativity
Dr Marie Hadley (University of Newcastle) and Dr Adam McDade (Flesh Chambers, Manchester)
Tuesday 17 November 2026 | 7:30 PM (Sydney, Australia) | Check your time zone
This talk presents Grey Lines, a tattoo and copying norms project by intellectual property scholar Marie Hadley and tattooist and design scholar Adam McDade. Exhibited at Watt Space Gallery in 2025 and Queen Mary University of London in 2026, Grey Lines offers a tattooist-centred, collaboration-driven account of contingent authorship in everyday practice, foregrounding the intersection of copying and creativity. It also reflects on the novel collaborative research process through which Hadley and McDade generated and captured practice-based and reflective data.
The talk explores the two Grey Lines installations and the research methods behind them, drawing on tattoo practice, embodied inquiry, and reflective approaches to support interdisciplinary work across different places and contexts. Through voice note excerpts, videos, and photographs, the authors show how they developed low-friction collaborative processes that flatten knowledge hierarchies and support authentic, meaningful interdisciplinary work. Members of the public are positioned as third-party collaborators within the project, with the exhibition, its participatory features, and everyday client interactions functioning as sites of knowledge production and co-creation. Authorship, collaboration, and the familiar intellectual property conundrum of using reference images to create new work are reframed through the tattooist’s lens of lived, embodied creative practice. The project highlights the necessity of creative methodologies and collaboration to generate meaningful insights that traditional academia is often ill-equipped to access.
Dr Marie Hadley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Newcastle. She specialises in copyright law and uses socio-legal methods and interdisciplinary collaboration to illuminate the legal, ethical, and cultural forces shaping creativity and copying. Marie collaborates widely with artists. Her projects have produced diverse traditional and non-traditional outputs, including articles, artworks, songs, curated exhibitions, and installations, most recently the tattoo + law installation Grey Lines.
Dr Adam McDade is a tattooist and academic with a background in illustration and design. He holds the world’s first practice-based PhD using tattooing as a research methodology (University of Sunderland, 2021), and his work has been described as “the most considered account of tattooing practice in the academic literature”. A first-generation university graduate from a single-parent, working-class background, Adam is committed to creating research and creative works that are accessible, relevant to the broader public, meaningful, and sincere. He is currently based at Flesh Chambers in Manchester, and has worked guest spots across the UK and Europe.