Portrait of Parks Sadler
In an objectified world, we are all – in some part – defined by the objects that surround us. Or at least they validate what’s within us. Each one of us is a solar system of stuff orbiting a bodily star; planetary passions that bring balance and countless bits of asteroidal debris like safety pins, laces, razor blades, keys, stationery, and cutlery that furnish our lives. Much like the delicate equilibrium of explosion and implosion that keeps a star burning, our own bodies are governed by a merry-go-round of decay and regeneration. Parts of our bodies replace their cells every decade. We shed skin and hair everywhere we go. The world is smeared with our bodily fluids.
If someone was to fastidiously collect every bit of you that you’ve cast off throughout your life, would the sum of all that matter be less than or greater than you? And at what point does our spillage outgrow us? I guess what I’m trying to say through this abject exercise is that objects tell histories, often more eloquently than our own words. Talkative possessions that testify not only of our existence but that of every hand they’ve ever passed through. Everything awaits to be subsumed by the Great Archive.
This idea of objects as living, whispering, bleeding things is central to artist Parks Sadler’s practice. Archives aren’t just the curated slivers of history that require white felt gloves to be handled, they’re also the minutiae of everyday life begging for your fingerprints. This is what Parks calls the active archive; a revelation of not only the physical but emotional imprint time leaves on everything.
Some say you’re a good kisser if you can tie a cherry stem with your tongue. This seemingly ridiculous bit of schoolyard lore was both salvation and entrapment for Parks, a closeted gay child growing up in conservative North Carolina. How could he prove that he was a good kisser when he didn’t want to kiss the people he was allowed and wasn’t allowed to kiss the people he wanted? So every night in his room he’d practice tying cherry stems with his tongue. Everyone was impressed. The realisation dawned on him much later that he’d been acting upon heteronormative pressure. But kids will often do what it takes to avoid social crucifixion.
Out of this ambivalence came Tie the Knot. This large scale, multi-screen work filled the gallery space of art’otel Hoxton in June 2025 with close-ups of Parks’ mouth chewing on cherries, tying their stems into a knot, and holding the result between his teeth. The floor to ceiling projections reflected in the glossy floor left one swallowed by the film, it’s repetition across the walls taking on a ritual, desperate significance. Suddenly the veil of anonymous mundanity drops and the cherry stem is no longer merely organic waste. Like the transubstantiation that turns bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the mind of a church-goer, the cherry stem at once becomes embroiled into collective myth and Parks’ personal history. We, along with Parks, are made to remember every single stem that’s danced around his tongue then spat out.
If Tie the Knot could be taken as the tender yet awkward anticipation of romance, Love Seat represents its breakdown. A two-seater sofa sawn in half with a wall between them. One half remains lonesomely suspended on the wall while the other has crashed to the ground. The imagery is quite obvious but I guess… so is the resentment between lovers on the rocks. When one becomes two, both parts are irrevocably changed; in such a manner does each half of the couch take on a life of its own, exhibiting a distinct personality; it separated from itself.
Is there such a thing as a truly sterile object? Parks’ careful use of found/acquired materials sternly denies this. Any object that’s passed through human hands collects a bit of them on the way out. Stare at a thing for long enough – like saying a word too many times – and it’ll be rendered strange and out of place. But that strangeness is simply its functional mask dropping to reveal past lives. Even the most mass-produced item invites you to imagine the (in)organic hands that built it.
As an object totally divorced from the context of the artwork, the sofa’s worn leather still tells a history of all the people who’ve sat on it. But by simply sawing the thing in half, Parks makes us focus on the story of two specific people. You can imagine all the evenings they’ve spent watching TV, all the sweet and bitter things they’ve said to each other, all the times they’ve made out or fucked on it, all the times one of them has had to sleep alone on it; this sofa becomes the culmination of all those moments. The foam bulging out of its open wound makes you wonder what other objects became collateral damage in the disintegration of this relationship.
Where shared things have become collateral damage, the subject of Parks’ project, Briefs, is the ammunition itself. Fishing for the past on the edge of an abyss, Parks reached out to former lovers asking for a pair of their underwear. What kind of conversations would’ve transpired during the act of retrieval? In a way he’s asking you to imagine how you’d react if your ex reached out asking for your underwear. Once acquired, Parks commemorates these bygone relics through sculptures and prints.
The sculptures float over their plinths as if worn by someone invisible - a presence formed out of absence. Equal parts monumental and mundane. Given that underwear usually doesn’t get shared, its material recollection is singular and individual. Which is why it’s easier to imagine a single personality rather than the accumulation of many within the folds and pose of these garments.
The prints, meanwhile, are cold, forensic facts. These ghostly x-rays present the briefs as anxiously self-conscious things. Every crease that time has introduced onto their surface is laid bare. Their gritty texture speaks of all the reasons they belong to an ex. Out of Parks’ oeuvre, these prints are the most overtly archival in their tendency to testify. They’re presented as records preserved solely for that purpose. The definition of an archival object broadens with humanity’s capabilities to leave evidence. There’s a camera in and outside every pocket and now photographs outnumber all the souls to have ever walked this earth. The archives grow exponentially to the dismay and delight of future historians.
Many objects were harmed during the making of this art because the artistic process is often destructive to its materials. Whether they meet their end by the printing press or a saw, they’re a ritual sacrifice offered up to themselves through the artwork. Their destruction immortalises them; a full-stop to a bizarre sentence.
Parks Sadler’s empathetic preservation of the ordinary emphasises just how thin and hazy the line between the private and public is. It’s a boundary demarcated through our objects, because what we think is solely ours has passed through different hands before. Which makes every interaction with our belongings a silent and intimate remembrance of someone we’ll probably never know.
