What happens when something as ordinary as falling asleep becomes something you spend your entire life chasing?Maltese artist Alexia Baldacchino is turning her lifelong experience with insomnia into a new exhibition exploring the strange space between being awake and drifting into a dream.Titled The Nectar of Sleep, the exhibition opens at il-Kamra ta’ Fuq in Mqabba on Sunday 20th September, and will run until 4th October.Curated by Melanie Erixon, the exhibition is the culmination of more than a year of research inspired by Baldacchino’s own insomnia, as well as her mother’s similar experiences with sleep.And that very personal starting point eventually developed into a much wider exploration of how we understand sleep.Baldacchino draws inspiration from Renaissance art, particularly Leonardo da Vinci’s La Scapigliata, embracing hazy forms, diffused light, soft clouds and deliberately unfinished imagery to recreate the uncertainty of dreams and memories.But there’s a distinctly modern element running through the exhibition too.The artist turned to data collected by a sleep-monitoring app, using its waves and fragmented records of rest as another source of visual inspiration.Through this, The Nectar of Sleep also questions our growing obsession with achieving the “perfect” night’s sleep, from tracking every hour of rest to wellness routines, influencers and products promising to optimise it.The paintings will be accompanied by a soundscape inspired by Renaissance and Medieval music, transforming the Mqabba gallery into an immersive space somewhere between history, technology, wakefulness and dreams.Rather than giving visitors a single interpretation, Baldacchino wants the works to remain open and unresolved, inviting people to slow down and contemplate the role sleep can play in healing, creativity and self-discovery.Baldacchino has explored everything from photography and poetry to songwriting, singing and design throughout her creative life, before eventually returning to painting more than two decades later.The Nectar of Sleep opens at il-Kamra ta’ Fuq in Mqabba at 11am on Sunday 20th September, and runs until 4th October.•