Opening this week at the Design Museum (and on view until 4 April 2027), 'Es Devlin: Other Worlds' is the multidisciplinary artist and designer's first European retrospective, featuring a close-up view of her practice over the past 30 years.
Having spent much of the past year working alongside Devlin and her team on her Guest Editor contribution to October Wallpaper* (look out for the special-edition concertina cover, available from the museum shop as well as from WallpaperSTORE*), the exhibition felt like a continuation of our conversations, and gave us further insight into a creative universe that feels both incredibly personal and touching upon universal, larger-than-life themes.
The exhibition, taking over the museum's ground-floor gallery, features a reproduction of Devlin's London studio, excerpts from her sketchbooks, an overview of her most celebrated installation, and an experiential, 2,000-book library, covering recurring themes of her career and offering an insight into her creative process.
Intimate and sprawling, 'Es Devlin: Other Worlds' combines moments of calm exploration of some of the more personal elements of her practice, and the grand, immersive creative moments some of the public might be familiar with. Devlin herself guides us through the space: her voice welcomes visitors as a video plays in her ‘studio’ (a faithful reproduction of her London workspace, complete with maquettes, books, and tools).
As the doors open scenographically onto the exhibition itself, visitors walk into a mirrored room with Devlin's Come Home Again, an illuminated composition debuted at Tate Modern in 2022 and featuring her drawings of 240 species, from mammals to insects, fish and birds, all found in London.
From there, the room leads to the ‘30-year desk’, a concept that Devlin has devised for the exhibition and which showcases her career at a glance. Featuring 5,000 objects from her personal archive, the curved structure includes 30 revolving models, maquettes, hundreds of sketches, and is accompanied by two wall installations dubbed The 50-Year Archive (parts I and II), including sketchbooks, drawings and paintings that have supported a life in creativity.
Walking across a bright red tunnel (a near-fluorescent shade that recurs in Devlin's practice, most recently gracing the slipcase to her Concise Atlas), visitors find themselves in yet another immersive, impactful space. On a mirrored platform sits Devlin's Infinite Library, featuring a colour-coded collection of kinetic sculptures featuring over 2,000 books that have informed her practice and worldview.
This path, from studio to practice to library, is not casual, but the exact journey that Devlin intends to offers to visitors. 'The reason I've laid the show out this way, is that when I came here, I noticed there's a lot of young people, designers, practitioners, coming through the space,' Devlin told Wallpaper*. 'People of all ages, perhaps looking for clues as to what they might want to do, how they might want to shape, or begin, their own practice. So I've offered every trace that led me along the way, because I thought it might be helpful for others to just be able to see, step by step, how a practice can evolve over 30 years.'
‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’ is on view until 4 April 2027
The Design Museum
224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG