Marie Hadley and Adam McDade
Grey Lines
Installation of digital photographic prints, tattoo stencil paper, cloth, sound (9:30 minutes), written text
An exhibition at Queen Mary University of London, London, 1 – 2 June 2026, and at Watt Space Gallery, Newcastle (Australia), 17 September – 15 November 2025 (online version available).
What does a two-headed wolf have to do with copyright law?
Grey Lines investigates authorship, collaboration, and copying norms in contemporary tattooing practice. Uniquely conducted through professional tattoo practice, reflective practice, and embodied inquiry as the primary methodologies for knowledge production, the project presents a sensory experience of tattoo as a medium and service, challenging how academia and law currently understand this creative industry.
Through ambient studio sounds and a physical setup reminiscent of a tattoo exhibition booth, the installation tells the story behind the design and execution of a custom two-headed wolf tattoo. It combines stencils, reflective commentary on the creative process, finer liner pen designs, and photographs of tattoo outcomes, to centre the embodied experience and varied everyday practice of the tattooist. The overlapping and entangled nature of norms, ethics, business considerations, relationships, creative expression, and the body is revealed, showing how aesthetic effects emerge through process, context, and interaction.
Audiences are invited to step into the grey lines that tattooists navigate daily and, in doing so, to experience practice led, collaborative inquiry as essential to developing a richer, more accurate, and more nuanced understanding of how law is understood, made, and negotiated (or not) in creative practice.