What do you do when your love bleeds out through your sleeves?

Jan 28
4 min read

Written by Sophie Nowakowska What do you do when your love bleeds out through your sleeves?

Or when your teenage self looks back at you.

With admiration. Interest. Hesitation.

How do you forget the ones that once meant everything, and now they are gone?

Living their lives somewhere else. With someone else.

This is where Parks Sadler’s work is situated. He doesn’t see himself as a sculptor, or a

photographer, or even a transmedia artist. He works with memory, intimacy, vulnerability,

and care. With what it means to love openly. With what it means to be seen, and what it

means to leave something behind. His works do not demand. They wait. They stay gentle

and soft.

Love. Desire. Sadness. A heart that is broken and loving at the same time.

Not the Last is a carrier. The work came from a simple gesture - receiving flowers for the first

time in his life. Something small. Something rare. An appreciation of presence. Of time. Of

tenderness. The flowers he used were temporary. Beautiful at the beginning, already moving

towards decay. Sadler wanted to hold on to the moment when blooming begins to collapse.

Roses from the bouquet are preserved in resin and placed inside white bricks. The contrast

is immediate. Something delicate enclosed within something heavy. Organic forms held

inside materials made to build, secure, and protect. Bricks function as foundations, as order,

as structure, but here, they do not hold a building. They hold flowers. The arrangement

resembles a garden, but not a controlled one. The roses are not aligned. Not placed in rows.

Some appear alone, gather together, sit at the edges or at the centre. Even though the work

is constructed by the artist, it feels as if the roses have chosen their own positions.

They exist in suspension. Neither fully alive nor fully gone. Preserved, but still carrying the

memory of decay. The work stays with the feeling of being held. Of being kept. Even as the

disappearance continues.

The next artwork Sadler created, How My Heart Is Worn, is also merely a carrier. A black

leather jacket he once wore to impress a partner. A piece of clothing that carried a desire to

be seen, to be adored. At first, the embroidered hearts in white and pink thread appear

decorative. But they hold something heavier - heart caught in a cycle of breaking and

healing, again and again. The jacket no longer holds a body. It holds memories. The hearts,

embroidered into leather, feel as if they are stitched directly into the artist’s skin. A needle

pierces something hard, and it obeys. Embroidery, once meant to decorate, becomes a way

to preserve pain. To make hurt visible. To keep it close.

Love. Desire. Despair. Healing. All stitched into the same surface. The hearts seem to yearn

to be noticed. To say that the wearer’s heart is open. That there is someone underneath, still

waiting to be seen.

Tie the Knot is also a carrier - a moving-image work and a return to teenage years. To

teasing. To the idea that if you can tie a knot with a cherry stem, you are a good kisser. It is

a memory of the pressure to prove oneself. To perform intimacy.

Presented as the final show concluding his residency at art’otel Hoxton, the three-screen

video loops endlessly. The memory does not stop. A desire to prove something to everyone,

now seen through the eyes of a grown man. Someone who understands intimacy differently.

Through this work, Sadler exposes himself in front of the audience. Not forcing them, but

asking to look. Letting them witness his vulnerability, bravery, sexuality, and tenderness. He

is showing a side of a man that is rarely allowed to exist publicly.

And at the end of it all, what remains is care. The artist reflects on what it means to be cared

for by society, to receive flowers as a man. How it feels like to open your heart, to tear it

open, to sew it back together, and to tear it open again. And again. And again.

These works feel like stages of becoming. Growing as a man. Not the one society expects.