A Fall at the Edge of Sleep

A Fall at the Edge of Sleep was a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Patric Rogers, presented as part of Liverpool Independents Biennial 2025.

Bringing together film, sculpture, installation and painting, the exhibition explored the fragile emotional terrain of contemporary life, where reality can feel elastic, unstable and continually shifting.

The work emerged from a period marked by global uncertainty, social fragmentation and a pervasive sense of disorientation. Rogers drew upon a familiar but difficult-to-describe sensation: the moment between sleep and wakefulness when consciousness abruptly returns, accompanied by a fleeting panic, a loss of bearings, and a temporary uncertainty about where, or even who, one is.

The exhibition took its title from this experience. Like a fall at the edge of sleep, the works occupied a threshold space between clarity and confusion, certainty and doubt. Across the gallery, audiences encountered images and environments that reflected the dissonance of living in a world capable of profound beauty and profound brutality in equal measure.

Rather than offering answers, A Fall at the Edge of Sleep created space for contemplation. The exhibition invited visitors to sit with uncertainty, to acknowledge feelings of helplessness and anxiety, and to consider how meaning might still be found through connection, care and collective resilience.

Looking back, the exhibition represented both a personal reflection and a broader meditation on the emotional condition of the present. It explored what it means to remain open to wonder while confronting the realities of an often fractured world, and how communities continue to sustain one another through acts of solidarity, imagination and hope.

As Rogers reflected:

"The work explored that feeling of being unsettled by our collective reality while also feeling powerless in the face of the world's relentless savagery, and yet somehow still remaining in awe of its beauty, its fragility, and the quiet strength of communities holding each other through it."