Es Devlin guest-edits Wallpaper*

If there is one thing that all of Es Devlin's projects have in common, it is a sense of wonder. Whether it's creating scenography for some of the world's most celebrated musical artists and theatres, or making a cultural statement through sculpture, installation and performance, her vision traverses scale, space and time. Born in London in 1971, Devlin started her practice in 1996 after a diverse academic career that reflects today's multidisciplinarity. A degree in English literature from Bristol University was followed by a fine art foundation course at Central Saint Martins and a place on the Motley Theatre Design Course. A multi-celebrated artist (from an OBE and CBE to Tony and Olivier Awards), her work intelligently spans genres. In 2026, in a serendipitous collision of anniversaries, her practice also turns 30, so it seemed fitting that we turned over some of Wallpaper’s 30th-anniversary October 2026 print issue to her. From a 16-page, limited-edition concertina cover with an iris-like cut-out that nods to an installation from her immersive 2024 retrospective (and accompanying book), An Atlas of Es Devlin, at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, to a photographic collaboration that brings her studio space onto the page, Devlin invites us into her world, giving us a glimpse into the breadth of her output, and demonstrating how her works offer moments of marvel and connection.

Out of this World: an exclusive interview with Es Devlin in her studio

She's been called an artist, designer, writer, sculptor, even magician – but really, Es Devlin says, she's an ‘everythingist'.

Thirty years into her practice, Devlin isn't pausing. She is, however, reflecting. With two major milestones arriving this autumn – the Design Museum's ‘Other Worlds' (2 October 2026 – 4 April 2027), the first major UK exhibition dedicated to her work, and a new edition of A Concise Atlas of Es Devlin – she has found herself looking back across three decades of projects that have ranged from opera and theatre to stadium tours, public art, architecture and publishing. Rather than revealing a career of restless reinvention, the process has exposed something else entirely.

The word ‘everythingist' arrived almost by accident. While researching a commission for V&A East Storehouse, Devlin discovered that the Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova had described herself that way more than a century ago. ‘She did everything. She was performance. She was interior design. She made portraits. She painted flowers. She wrote a Rayonist manifesto with her husband. She was a theatre designer…' The idea immediately resonated. Devlin sees the same expansive curiosity in figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and, more recently, Virgil Abloh – creative polymaths who refused to be pigeonholed or recognise any boundaries between disciplines. ‘I feel like, these days, you need somehow to find permission to be an everythingist because it feels like there's a sort of pressure always to find your thing,' she says. ‘And actually, maybe the thing is the everything.'

Preparing A Concise Atlas only served to strengthen that conviction. ‘I tend to view it as multiple scenes in one script,' she says. ‘I'm used to working on scripts that have multiple scenes that all add up to one line of enquiry.' Revisiting 30 years of work ‘has really helped me to find the common threads through the practice. Otherwise it can all feel a bit fragmented.'

That thread forms the backbone of ‘Other Worlds'. The Design Museum's exhibition is an invitation to explore the mechanisms of her imagination. Visitors will find a detailed recreation of her London studio, where, surrounded by sketchbooks, paintings and maquettes, a vast circular ‘30-Year Desk' links projects as varied as her revolving stage for The Lehman Trilogy, immersive mirror installation Forest of Us, the London 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremony, the Super Bowl halftime show and monumental concert stages. Audiences will already be familiar with the polished spectacle of an Es Devlin show, but the exhibition is a true behind-the-scenes experience. ‘Other Worlds' exposes the research, reading and relentless curiosity that underpin them. The studio is framed as a living archive, with theatre texts sitting alongside scientific treatises, philosophy beside engineering, and cardboard maquettes next to notebooks full of observations. As the first act of every commission, sketches, often in charcoal or graphite, are centre stage.

Drawing, for Devlin, is less about representation than thinking. But if drawing is how she begins a project, reading is what continually replenishes it. Books have long been the hidden architecture of her practice. The recreated studio at ‘Other Worlds' reveals shelves where literature, philosophy, ecology, neuroscience and engineering sit side by side, their ideas feeding one another as readily as her own commissions move between disciplines. Writing, meanwhile, has become a way of understanding the work after it has been made. She describes it as ‘a workout for your interiority' – a means of strengthening the inner resonance against which every new idea is measured. Preparing A Concise Atlas, she says, forced her to step back from three decades of making and discover the coherence beneath it.

Libraries, too, have become a recurring motif. From Library of Light and Please Feed the Lions to Congregation and The Poem Pavilion, they appear as miniature cathedrals of collectively authored and shared ideas. The fascination stretches back to childhood. Devlin, who lived in London before moving to Rye, East Sussex, at the age of six, is the daughter of a teacher and a journalist, and remembers repeatedly renewing the same library books. Not to read them, but because they were literally propping up the cardboard structures she was building. It's an image she finds funny now, but there's something symbolic in the way books have always underpinned her imagination, both physically and intellectually.

Es Devlin's ‘everythingist' approach doesn't just cover creative disciplines. It's also a philosophy of looking beyond herself. If books are the foundations of Devlin's imagination, collaboration is what powers it. She describes her studio as a ‘no-no practice', where ideas are rarely rejected outright. ‘As I've grown in understanding of my own line of enquiry, I've become less anxious, and less tenacious to my own ideas,' she says. Instead, she has learnt to ‘not block', as she puts it. ‘I've also become fascinated by the etymology of the word compromise – it comes from com-promittere – which really suggests ‘a mutual promise', a much more generous description than we've come to understand, and I've tried to enter into this spirit in my collaborations.'

That openness recently transformed a production of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. Having spent months developing a plane for the stage, she changed everything when she opened her mind to other ideas. ‘I was fixated on it being a particular thing. It felt like a really good idea: The Flying Dutchman on a huge aeroplane...' The director, Yuval Sharon, was less sure. ‘He kept saying, “But I'm wondering what's at the bottom of the lake? What are the forces that are disturbing this journey? I keep thinking about the forces beneath the lake”.'

Her initial reaction was to dismiss it, she admits. ‘I went to the practical things. The lake is not very deep... the design has to be about 50m wide... so we can't store anything deep. From that point of view, I wasn't really getting anywhere. But when I tried to enter his imagination – when I tried to promise mutually with him – I stopped thinking in language and started to think in image.'

Devlin started to think about Jonah and the whale, Godzilla and the Loch Ness monster. ‘And all of human fear of what is unseen and what lies beneath the surface.' The aeroplane disappeared and in its place came a giant whale. ‘I had to tell the team to imagine the plane had taken some ayahuasca and become a whale,' she laughs.

Across many of the monumental stages, kinetic sculptures and immersive installations with which Devlin has become synonymous, perhaps the greatest secret to her success involves that which she cannot control. ‘The setting of the sun is the biggest event that happens in our outdoor productions,' she says. ‘We torment ourselves for months designing giant hands coming out of lakes and aeroplanes and whales or whatever we're doing, but actually, when the audience are there, the biggest event is the sun setting. Therefore what you need to do is be aware of that and respond to it.'

For Come Home Again, her installation outside Tate Modern, Devlin's team shifted the performance time by several minutes each day to coincide with the changing quality of twilight, waiting for the precise moment when ‘an electric light bulb or a lit flame or a piece of projection will bite', she says. Stadium concerts follow the same logic. The darkness is carefully anticipated, ‘the moment where... the lid of darkness, the shift in all of the audience's minds, will happen'. That evolving relationship with light and nature finds one of its most ambitious expressions in Venice, where Devlin has been appointed artistic director of Homo Faber 2026. Titled ‘An Island of Light', the biennial, which runs until 30 September, unfolds across San Giorgio Maggiore through 15 immersive installations celebrating great craftsmanship from around the world. Devlin's concept uses water, mirrors, light and movement as active collaborators, illuminating the work of hundreds of artisans. Visitors encounter kinetic displays of handcrafted objects, breathing wooden sculptures, live workshops, reflective pools and luminous paper installations.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to learn how well this sensibility extends to print. For her guest editorship of Wallpaper’s October 2026 issue, Devlin created a limited-edition, 16-page concertina cover (adorning copies of the magazine that will be available to buy on WallpaperSTORE* and at the Design Museum in London from 2 October) that unfolds like a piece of paper architecture, alongside an intricate insert that asks readers to handle the magazine rather than simply read it. Even here, she is thinking as a scenographer, choreographing revelation one fold at a time. As with ‘Other Worlds', she wanted the issue to place process over spectacle, transforming paper into another space.

Long before she was designing stadiums and museums, Devlin worked as a magician's assistant while training as a set designer. Recruited by theatrical producer David Gothard, she joined the experimental circus of Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's daughter, where she worked backstage preparing costumes, props and illusions. ‘Literally, my job was to put the rabbit in the hat,' she laughs. ‘And to clean up the rabbit's poo when it shat in the hat.' More importantly, she says, she learnt ‘how magic tricks work' and ‘the rhythm of a theatrical production from the backstage side'. It's a story she tells in passing, but it clearly shaped her approach to making – conjuring magic for audiences everywhere is what she's known for after all. The experience, she says, taught her that magic has very little to do with deception itself and everything to do with directing attention. ‘Magic isn't about tricking people,’ she says. ‘It's about destabilising people's preconceptions. If you destabilise what an audience thinks is happening, then perhaps you destabilise their preconceptions about other things as well.'

Looking back over 30 years, that feels like a key to understanding the practice. Whether creating immersive worlds for Beyoncé, U2 or The Weeknd, reimagining Shakespeare and Wagner for the stage, filling the courtyard of Somerset House with a forest or designing immersive public artworks that invite thousands of strangers to participate, Devlin is repeatedly asking audiences to see differently. The spectacle has never really been the point. It's just the mechanism through which perceptions are altered.

In the end, this is why ‘everythingist' feels like far more than a rejection of specialism. By refusing to accept the boundaries that separate art from science, nature from technology, reading from making, audience from performer, Es Devlin accesses the magic of the creative mind. ‘I would say,' she reflects, ‘the thesis of all the things I've done... would be an assault on the idea of separation by any means necessary.'

‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds' is on show from 2 October 2026 – 4 April 2027 at the Design Museum, London W8, designmuseum.org, esdevlin.com

Es Devlin: a portfolio

Wallpaper’s October 2026 Guest Editors’ Issue is available from 3 September, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today