Hisser: When Sinkholes Swallow Everything. Hisser (2015) came from a creepy news story about a Florida guy who vanished when a sinkhole opened under his bed. The work shows a male figure — animated by Atkins’ own performance — who apologizes, masturbates, and falls into a sinkhole. “I started fantasizing about every story ending like this,” Atkins says.

Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015, installation view, Tate Britain. Photo: Josh Croll © Tate Photography

The piece plays across three screens, making you confused about scale — the bedroom looks like both a theater stage and a dollhouse. Atkins calls these digital versions “surrogates” — figures that can handle the psychological stuff he can’t. He mapped his face onto the character: “So I am in there too, performing, wearing the figure like a mask.”

Ed Atkins, Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me, 2024, installation view, Tate Britain. Photo: Josh Croll © Tate Photography

Loss, Love, and Nurses Come and Go. Loss runs through everything Atkins does, and it gets most personal in his new feature-length film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024). The film stars Toby Jones as Peter, who reads from ‘Sick Notes’ — Atkins’ father’s diary from his final six months after a cancer diagnosis. After finishing, Jones lies on the floor pretending to be sick, recreating a children’s game while his partner Claire (Saskia Reeves) feeds him magical concoctions and covers his face in Post-its.

Ed Atkins, installation view, Tate Britain. Photo: Josh Croll © Tate Photography

At the exhibition’s heart are masses of drawings on Post-it notes that Atkins makes for his children. He calls them “miniature images of seemingly infinite invention” and “tiny, laboured attempts to communicate feeling.” They’re joyful, playful, absurd, and full of love — like a legend at the bottom of a map, teaching us how to look and feel.

The Messy Reality of Being Human. Atkins’ pencil drawings look like digital print-outs at first, until you spot the actual pencil texture breaking through. His brutal self-portraits are drawn from the worst angles with captions where he trashes his own appearance. There are also convincing paintings of mattresses and pillows with traces of absent bodies.

The exhibition uses repetition and difference as a structural device — splitting artworks across rooms, repeating them, or changing their format. Atkins wants to create “a sense of the familiar made strange, of digression, mistake, confusion. “For him, this represents how messy life really is: “the more we experience, the more complex and less contained it becomes.”

Currently teaching in Hamburg, Atkins has become our essential guide to living between digital and real worlds. His work proves that even digital hearts can break, and he’s unmatched at showing us what it means to stay messily, stubbornly human in an age where the line between artificial and authentic keeps disappearing.

Ed Atkins Exhibition
Date: 2nd April – 25th August 2025
Opening Hours: 10:00 – 18:00
Place: Tate Britain
Address: Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
Tel: +44 (0)20 7887 8888
https://www.tate.org.uk