In the former Eastern Bloc region, artists and researchers working with archives often explore silence as well as what’s present — what was hidden, censored, or deemed unworthy of remembrance? For London-based interdisciplinary artist Parks Sadler, who spent a formative period in Wrocław, Poland, the act of remembering becomes a radical gesture. Their practice — grounded in photography, printmaking, and sculpture — treats memory as something living, tactile, and deeply human.
“I describe my work as an active archive,” Sadler says, “a place where intimacy and history intersect, refusing to be smoothed over.”
Their approach feels acutely relevant to our region’s current conversations around visibility and belonging. By reimagining how personal memory can operate as public record, Sadler aligns with a broader lineage of artists who translate loss, absence, and identity into material form.
Image by Sophie Bryer
Briefs: A Soft Monument
At the centre of Sadler’s practice lies Briefs — a series that transforms underwear belonging to former lovers into delicate prints and sculptural compositions. What could so easily be private memorabilia becomes, in their hands, a quiet monument to tenderness and loss.
Through layers of ink, translucent impressions, and softened contours, Sadler renders the traces of touch almost sacred. The garments, once worn and intimate, are pressed into permanence — holding the tension between affection and absence, between the erotic and the archival. Each print feels like both confession and preservation.
What began as an instinctive act of keeping soon evolved into a sustained investigation of queer material culture: how everyday objects can carry entire histories when institutions fail to. Exhibited in Queering Hedonism (curated by STOGGAF Collective, 2023), Briefs positioned vulnerability as resistance. In a society that has long policed intimacy, Sadler’s quiet gestures of exposure become profoundly political.
Between Geographies
Sadler’s biography itself speaks to the layered geographies of identity. Born in North Carolina and now based in London, they inhabit multiple cultural landscapes — from the coded, often conservative queer expressions of the American South to the experimental openness of London’s art scene. Yet their time in Poland in 2018 left an enduring impression: the experience of living in a country where queerness still largely occupies the margins sharpened their awareness of how visibility operates differently across contexts.
In Wrocław, Sadler exhibited in shows like Human & Something More and Deformacja & Transformacja at the Academy of Art and Design — encounters that grounded their sensitivity to how the body can signify transformation and resistance. The materiality that defines Briefs — soft surfaces bearing emotional weight — can be traced back to those early engagements with post-industrial Polish aesthetics, where fragility and endurance often coexist.
An Archive in Motion
Sadler’s “active archive” refuses to settle. Memory, for them, is not a document but an evolving choreography of materials. Working across continents, they weave together traces from different histories and communities. In London, their residencies and exhibitions — from Art’otel Hoxton to the forthcoming solo show at Maximillian Wolfgang Gallery — extend their inquiry into how personal narratives occupy public space.
Their works blur the line between sculpture and print, using negative space as a form of testimony. Absence becomes evidence; what is lost becomes legible again. Through these subtle material gestures, Sadler redefines the very nature of the archive — not as something sealed or institutional, but as a breathing, sensate terrain.
Parks spent a significant amount of time in Wroclaw, Poland: “searching for an experience that would be uniquely part of my story”. Polish culture resonated with the artist deeply, mirroring personal experiences of openness and hospitality from the American South.
“My time living in Wrocław profoundly shaped my artistic practice, bringing into focus how overlapping histories can exist in a single place—and how those layers become embedded in the very materials that hold them. I encountered a landscape where Polish, Bohemian, Prussian, and German pasts cohabit visibly and invisibly, a coexistence that’s both tense and cohesive. This dynamic became a key influence in my work, where I use materials—whether photographic paper, fabric, or cast objects—as carriers of history. Wrocław’s built environment, with its scarred facades and lovingly restored squares, reflects a uniquely Polish aesthetic history marked by rupture and care, erasure and restoration. That visual and material tension taught me to approach my work not only as a record of what’s present, but as a dialogue with what’s been buried or silenced. Whether in printmaking or sculpture, I now work with surfaces and symbols that echo this tension—inviting the viewer to see how identity, like the city, is formed through strata of time and remembering.”
Holding the Unseen
To enter Sadler’s world is to encounter the archaeology of emotion. Their works hum with what cannot be easily said: the warmth of touch, the ache of endings, the persistence of love. They do not monumentalise queer life through grandeur but through intimacy — through fabric, impression, and memory.
In doing so, Sadler situates their experience within a wider historical consciousness — one that resonates across borders. Their practice speaks not only of personal remembrance, but of collective visibility: an invitation to look closer, to honour what has been overlooked, and to recognise that even the smallest relics can hold entire worlds.
