'I am not sure I exist,' says Es Devlin, dramatically. 'Actually, I am the sum total of every book I've ever read, every one I've ever loved, every mountain I've ever walked over.'

The artist and designer is quoting Jorge Luis Borges because, she insists: 'That's genuinely my feeling.' And it’s a relatable one at that.

For Devlin, books are the architecture of a life, with every author leaving an imprint. 'Every time you read anything,' she says, 'the architecture of one's brain is changed. Every time you have a new thought you change.'

It’s this belief that inspired her newest work, Library of the Four Winds. Sponsored by Penhaligon's, the poetic installation at Castle Howard – Britain's best-known country house, recognised globally as the setting for Brideshead Revisited and, more recently, Bridgerton – in North Yorkshire, the installation has been conceived to mark the tricentenary of Sir John Vanbrugh's death. The work transforms the architect's folly, the Temple of the Four Winds, into a rotating library composed of more than 250 books drawn from Devlin's personal collection.

Es Devlin's books illuminate Castle Howard's Temple of the Four Winds

The books are arranged into a luminous revolving sculpture and accompanied by recordings of the artist reading selected passages aloud. 'I've made a revolving library,' she explains. 'It's very personal to me. It's a library of all the books that make me who I am.'

The commission finds an unexpectedly sympathetic historical counterpart in Vanbrugh himself. Although best known today as the architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, Vanbrugh's career defied easy categorisation. He was a playwright, political activist, soldier, theatre manager and sometime prisoner, as well as an architect. Devlin was less interested in responding directly to his buildings than to the restless, expansive, charismatic character of 'Van the man'.

Sir John Vanbrugh’s legacy

'I would respond more to the texture of the man's being, the texture of the man's choices,' she says. 'There he is, at once a man of letters and the theatre, designing the Haymarket at the same time he's building Blenheim Palace.' Particularly of note was Vanbrugh's fascination with systems – literary, political and architectural. 'I think he was interested in systems. I think he cared about geometry,' says Devlin. 'That's what I see as the common denominator between the work in literature, the work in architecture, the work in politics. It's a fascination that underpins a courage and a desire to make change.'

His relentless curiosity resonates strongly with Devlin's own practice, which has moved effortlessly between theatre, opera, public art, architecture and performance (as mapped in her 2023 monograph). Looking back at Vanbrugh and his contemporaries, she sees a period before knowledge had been divided into separate disciplines. 'These were men who were making architecture. They were also, as they made their architecture, creating scientific experiments,' she says, pointing to the intellectual culture that produced figures such as Vanbrugh, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. 'This was a period where knowledge was understood to be something holistic. If you were a man of letters, of course you'd be a man of architecture as well.'

The setting of the Temple of the Four Winds amplifies those ideas. Perched on a promontory overlooking the Castle Howard estate, it is at once pavilion, viewpoint and retreat. A place for refreshment and reading alike. 'What I love about that building is there is no specifically designed, defined purpose for it,' says Devlin.

Beyond the revolving library itself, four curved tables circle the temple, inviting visitors to sit together, talk and/or browse books from Devlin's shelves. The project arrives during the UK's National Year of Reading, which for Devlin is about more than the promotion of literacy. She sees reading instead as a social act – a way of encountering other minds.

'We really hope this is going to encourage people to come, to sit, to meet each other through texts,' she says.

The books on display are hers, and are not only well leafed, but covered in annotations accumulated over years of reading. 'I tend to only read with a pencil in my hand,' she says. 'I either underline things or I get in a rage with them and go, “No!” next to them.'

The passages visitors hear throughout the installation are taken from those markings: sentences that most challenged, delighted or changed the artist. Among the titles Devlin references are The Gift by Lewis Hyde; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; and Are We Human? by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Quotations from Jorge Luis Borges and Audre Lorde also form part of the installation's intellectual framework.

'Most books I read change me,' she says, 'but these are the ones without which I probably wouldn't have the worldview that I do.'

Library of the Four Winds is on view until 27 September 2026
castlehoward.co.uk

Choose Love has announced its auction to raise funds for humanitarian aid in Palestine. The auction, which runs from 26 March to 9 April 2026, will see the work of contemporary artists go on public exhibition before being sold to the highest bidder.

The artists include Sarah Ball, Jake Chapman, Es Devlin, Jeremy Deller, Brian Eno, Nan Goldin, Misan Harriman, Charlie Mackesy, Malak Mattar, and Grayson Perry, among others.

Choose Love art auction raises funds for Together for Palestine

The exhibition and auction follow the Together For Palestine concert (17 September 2025) at Ovo Arena, London, which raised over £2m for humanitarian organisations. For the auction, Choose Love has partnered with Gideon Berger Studio, London art space Hope 93 (where the public exhibition will be displayed) and British Palestinian art dealer Zayna Al-Saleh.

The auction will include Es Devlin’s Redraw The Edges of Yourself; Grayson Perry’s ceramics work Lady with Fireworks; Jeremy Deller’s new work with Ed Hall, The Constant Buzz of a Drone; two works by Khaled Hourani, Watermelon Flag and Kendaka; and Nablus by Nabil Anani.

Since 2015, Choose Love has worked across 50 countries to support people in times of crisis, providing daily essentials and trying to ensure that displaced families and individuals have what they need to rebuild their lives. The funds of this initiative will go towards food and water, healthcare, shelter, mental health support and Taawon, the largest orphan care programme in Gaza.

‘In these turbulent and frightening times, it’s more important than ever that we put humanity first, and make sure families and children have what they need to survive,’ says Josie Fernandez-Marelli, CEO of Choose Love. ‘There is still an urgent need to support vital organisations providing humanitarian aid on the ground in Gaza. We are proud to stand with Together For Palestine, and deeply grateful to every artist for their contributions, supporting our partners to save as many lives as possible.’

The Choose Love auction will be open for bids from 26 March – 9 April and an exhibition of the works included will be open to the public at Hope 93 in London over the same period.

2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year for design lovers, with an array of global design exhibitions set to be staged at some of the world's most celebrated institutions. Our exhibition calendar includes retrospectives of design legends, from Verner Panton to Lella and Massimo Vignelli, and in-depth looks at the work of giants such as Isamu Noguchi and Alessandro Mendini.

We also can’t wait to delve deeper into the archives of some of our favourite grandes dames of design, with shows dedicated to Hella Jongerius, Es Devlin and Sabine Marcelis.

Below are the institutional exhibitions we are most looking forward to – mark your diaries, and don’t miss our 2026 design fairs calendar too.

2026 design exhibitions to discover

‘Fungi: Anarchist Designers’ at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam

This groundbreaking design exhibition curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and designer Feifei Zhou presents fungi as 'radical designers in a world beyond human control'. On view at Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut, the display explores how mushrooms and moulds can cause decomposition, death and destruction, but also explores their potential to work together with human and non-human life. The curator commissioned seven new installations for the exhibition, created by designers working closely with scientists, and also includes artworks from artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Annicka Yi. The thought-provoking exhibition aims to challenge our perception of design while answering the question, what can we learn from non-human life?

Until 8 August 2026, Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam

Alessandro Mendini at Estorick Collection, London

The first solo exhibition of Alessandro Mendini’s work in the UK, this show features a curation of over 50 pieces, ranging from furniture and drawings to paintings, rugs and objects. The playful poetry of Mendini's work is explored through the artistic references and inspirations that helped shape his career. Among the connections woven by the exhibition are those with Futurist artist Fortunato Depero, to whom the designer dedicated two works in fabric, and Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings, referenced in Mendini's Kandissi sofa.

16 January – 10 May 2026, Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN

‘Noguchi’s New York’ at The Noguchi Museum

Isamu Noguchi first arrived in New York City in 1922 and, despite his globe-spanning career in art and design, the city remained a base for him throughout his life – and its material, cultural, social and political landscapes a profound influence on his ideas and work. In turn, Noguchi left his own mark on the city – with public art proposals and communal spaces designed for engagement and play (many of which faced opposition from figures such as NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses). Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, this exhibition examines Noguchi’s enduring efforts to give back to the city that inspired him. It also celebrates the museum itself as one of his most lasting contributions to New York, highlighting the dialogue between art and surroundings that defined Noguchi’s vision and legacy.

4 February – 5 July 2026, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

‘Art of Noise’ at Cooper Hewitt, New York

This major exhibition examines how design has shaped the way we experience music over the last century. From concert posters and album covers to the design of radios, phonographs, digital players and sound systems, ‘Art of Noise’ brings together over 300 objects from the collections of Cooper Hewitt and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to reveal how designers have influenced our relationship with sound. The exhibition also features dynamic audio environments by Stockholm-based Teenage Engineering and multidisciplinary artist Devon Turnbull, inviting visitors to engage with sound and design in entirely new ways – from custom listening rooms to innovative seating environments – showing how visual and industrial practices both reflect and shape cultural, technological and social shifts in music.

13 February – 19 July 2026, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York

‘Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things’ at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein

The first retrospective of Hella Jongerius’ work, this exhibition follows the Vitra Design Museum's acquisition of her archives and charts the Dutch designer's creative trajectory across several disciplines, including textiles, ceramics, furniture, lighting, and sculpture. Alongside the archives will be an overview of Jongeriuslab, the designer's studio, and its unique approach to creativity, shaped by a mix of 'layering ideas, drawing connections, emphasising materiality, exposing process, and researching deeply, with a dedication to craft, colour, and cosmic thinking'.

14 March – 6 September 2026, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

‘Lella and Massimo Vignelli’ at Triennale Milano

A major retrospective dedicated to the work of Lella and Massimo Vignelli, this exhibition is a testament to the designers’ crucial impact on popular culture through product design and visual communications. The Vignellis left post-war Milan and settled in New York to establish their studio in 1965, and their ‘intellectual and human journey’ is narrated through a curated selection of objects, furniture, interiors, drawings, models, sketches, photographs, manuals, trademarks, books, covers, and magazines. The exhibition is designed by Jasper Morrison, and created with the support of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA), which preserves more than 750,000 objects from the studio's history.

25 March – 6 September 2026, Triennale Milano, Viale Alemagna 6, Milan

‘Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space’ at Vitra Schaudepot, Weil am Rhein

It’s no exaggeration to say that Danish architect and designer Verner Panton (1926-1998) transformed furniture, interiors, fabrics, lamps and buildings with his bold forms, vibrant colours and visionary ideas. In 2026, he would have celebrated his 100th birthday; to mark the occasion, the Vitra Design Museum’s Schaudepot exhibition – one of the most significant collections of Panton’s designs – is presenting his work chronologically and thematically. The exhibition highlights iconic pieces such as the ‘Panton’ chair and the 1970 ‘Visiona II’ installation; it also reconstructs the designer’s 1970 ‘Fantasy Landscape’, a walk-in environment that transformed the way people experienced space, colour and form. The exhibition places Panton’s work in its historical context, examining his innovations in materials and production, the postwar social shifts that shaped his designs, and the influence of the Space Age.

23 May 2026 – 9 May 2027, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

Es Devlin at the Design Museum, London

This is the first major UK survey of Es Devlin’s 30-year career, showcasing her work across sculpture, performance and light installations. Operating at the intersection of art, performance, architecture and technology, Devlin is known for elevating stage design to an art form. Her work treats audiences as ‘temporary societies’ – rather than serving as a backdrop, it shapes how people gather, move and feel within a space, whether that’s through kinetic stage sculptures for artists like Beyoncé, U2 and The Weeknd, or monumental installations for events such as the Olympic ceremonies and Super Bowl halftime show. Developed in close collaboration with Devlin, this retrospective features rare maquettes, sketches, annotated texts and process materials alongside new sculptures and installations created specifically for the exhibition, highlighting her transformative influence on contemporary art and design while revealing the ideas and processes behind her most ambitious work.

18 September 2026 – 11 April 2027, Design Museum, London

‘Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley’ at Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas

In the 15 years since establishing their design studio, twin brothers Nikolai and Simon Haas have crafted a world filled with magical creatures and larger-than-life biomorphic ideas that also happen to be brilliant design objects. This exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art explores the Austin natives' magical output; discover sculptural objects made in a variety of techniques and materials, including porcelain, bronze, wool, glass beads, fur, and more.

26 September 2026 – 17 January 2027, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, 200 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd

‘Sabine Marcelis – Light and Color’ at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich

Sabine Marcelis’ first museum exhibition is dedicated to the Dutch designer’s impeccable colour and light work, exploring the past few years' output alongside newly commissioned light pieces. On view at Zürich's Museum für Gestaltung, the show presents an insight into Marcelis' practice, with samples and material studies offering a look behind the scenes of her work, combined with a carefully conceived spatial experience that honours her expressive designs.

30 October 2026 – 14 March 2027, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Pfingstweidstrasse 96

‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’ at the Design Museum, London

This landmark exhibition highlights contemporary Black designers who are reshaping the British and global design landscape. Ambitious and wide-ranging, it encompasses furniture, architecture, fashion and installation. The featured designers, including the likes of Mac Collins, Samuel Ross, Bianca Saunders and Giles Tettey Nartey, draw on identity, culture and community to create work that reflects the complexities of modern Black experience. The exhibition situates this work within a broader historical context, referencing movements such as the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and the New Black Aesthetic of the 1980s, while interpreting these legacies for today’s landscape. ‘The Nue Black Aesthetic’ reveals the transformative ways Black designers are shaping design, as well as inviting audiences to rethink entrenched narratives about who defines it.

6 November 2026 – 8 August 2027, Design Museum, London

This year, Zara turns 50, and to celebrate, the Spanish company enlisted as many creative friends as its years in business. Each creative was asked to create a piece that would encapsulate the spirit of Zara, and the group spans different creative fields that reflect the company's evolution over the past five decades, from a fashion retailer to a leading lifestyle brand. You can now shop the limited edition collection in full via zara.com.

The list of people (which coincidentally are also the names for the perfect birthday party guestlist) includes Rosalia, Es Devlin, Marc Newson, Alexandre De Betak, Naomi Campbell, Nick Knight, Pat McGrath and Vincent Van Duysen, among many more. The eclectic collection (available from 6 October 2025) features fashion, accessories, furniture and design objects, all united by a desire to celebrate Zara.

The fifty objects will be unveiled this week at a dedicated pop-up in Paris, and all proceeds from the collection will be donated to non-profit organisation Women's Earth Alliance, whose mission is to protect our environment by empowering women's leadership. Zara will match the donation, while also donating 20,000 euros to 50 charitable organisations chosen by the participating artists.

With great freedom granted to each creative for its tribute, the objects in the collection give us a great glimpse into their personal universe. Pierpaolo Piccioli's hot pink surfboard, Luca Guadagnino's dog-embroidered jumper, Sarah Andelman's book holder, Christy Thurlington's luggage are as unexpected and bold as they are intimate.

'I’ve learned that when I attempt to fill a void with art, I’m really encircling the void with practice, participation, and love,' Es Devlin told us of her concrete lamp, defined by a series of layers of materials around an empty core.

In its five decades, Zara has demonstrated its ability to speak different creative languages, adapting them to its accessible fashion and design approach. Recent collaborations with the likes of Samuel Ross, Guido Palau, Collagerie and Vincent Van Duysen are a testament to the company's wide reach.

Van Duysen in particular has collaborated on a wide interiors collection presented over the past few years, which distilled the designer's visual codes into new furniture and object designs. 'It gave me the opportunity to reflect on who I am – not only as a person but also as an architect and as a designer,' he told Wallpaper* at the time.

For the anniversary, he created a glass vessel whose starting point was 'the sensuality and femininity expressed through its continuous lines,' he told us. 'As you move around the piece, it reveals ever-changing textures and perspectives, much like life itself. This work is also a tribute to the excellence of Spanish craftsmanship: a celebration of singular pieces, each with its own distinct character. No two alike.'

Meanwhile, Bureau Betak founder Alexandre de Betak created a pyramid-shaped lamp: 'pyramids and moving lights have always been obsessions—from album covers of The Cure, Pink Floyd, and Earth, Wind & Fire since a kid, to elaborate light-and-buzzer contraptions guarding my teenage bedroom, all mixed with chic Gabriella Crespi–inspired brass dream objects of the time.'

'Zara’s wonderfully global reach and reputation for quality design has made for a hugely enjoyable collaboration,' adds Marc Newson, who created a set of colourful glasses. 'Here, as is often my way, I wanted to toy with material limits and expectations. These luminous glass tumblers exploit colour as a solid entity: we assume glass will carry a degree of translucence, but here the opposite is true. The result is a joyful and functional collection; pops of colour on your kitchen table.'

The anniversary collection is unveiled through a week-long pop-up during Paris Fashion Week, with an exhibition space curated by Sarah Andelman, which will include a bespoke soundtrack by Michel Gaubert and a café by We Are Ona, as well as a series of talks moderated by Derek Blasberg.

'It is an honour that these artists have chosen to mark our birthday with us in this way,' says Marta Ortega Pérez, Nonexecutive Chair of Inditex. 'Each is a leader of their field, in terms of imagination, innovation and integrity. They share the same passions as Zara have since the beginning: quality of craft and the joy of design.'

The anniversary collection is now available from zara.com

The Poetess of Light truly lives up to her name, dressed in yellow and bathed in a golden glow that gently warms Milan on the morning we meet to speak. Invited by Salone del Mobile, Es Devlin presents one of the most anticipated projects of the week: a monumental installation titled ‘Library of the Light’, hosted in one of Milan’s iconic cultural spaces, the Pinacoteca di Brera. Upon learning of the venue, the artist and stage designer wanted to explore its origins. Its name derives from pinakothēkē, she tells me, a Greek term meaning a storage box for painted boards.

‘Last year, when I first visited the Pinacoteca di Brera, the density of light overwhelmed me,’ Devlin says. ‘It’s a multi-layered place that contains at least five worlds in one: it has many libraries, a number of art galleries, and an art school with courses in fine art, scenic painting, stage design.’

Es Devlin unveils ‘Library of Light’ at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan

Officially established in 1809, the Pinacoteca lives within the historic Palazzo di Brera, which also contains several other cultural institutions: the Braidense National Library, the Astronomical Observatory, the Botanical Garden, and – as evidenced by the stream of young visitors carrying backpacks – the Academy of Fine Arts. It’s like a parallel universe in the heart of Milan, she explains. Just outside, people are out on the streets – eating, drinking, shopping – while inside, it feels like you’ve stepped into another world: ‘When you enter Brera, it's as if the traces of conversation, discovery, building of knowledge, and revelation – whether expressed in light, paint, manuscript, hand-painted text, printed text, or even microfiche – have been stored here for centuries.’

Her ‘Library of the Light’ is an 18m revolving cylindrical sculpture formed of luminous shelves containing over 3,000 books. It’s set within the imposing 17th-century Cortile d'Onore, where a statue of Napoleon by Canova as Mars the Peacemaker stands athletically in the middle of the courtyard. ‘The statues placed around the courtyard are all celebrated scholars holding instruments of knowledge: compasses, books, maps or globes,’ Devlin explains. ‘You’ll find just one woman, Maria Gaetana Agnesi – she’s on the right as you come in. She’s quietly sitting there, not holding anything. She's not got any arms, actually. Just the bust. I came away from the visit thinking, I need to learn more about her – she might be an interesting point of departure for this project.’

Whenever Devlin approaches a new project, she immerses herself in research. This time, she discovered the brilliant mind of Agnesi, known for her groundbreaking 1748 calculus textbook, as well as the later Il Cielo Mistico, a more contemplative spiritual work. ‘It's astonishing that someone who was so devoted to maths and calculus was also deep in this ecstatic relationship with her faith,’ Devlin says. ‘I'm genuinely interested in that, because I think that we are all holding our incompatible positions together, every minute.’

Another key source of inspiration was psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. Devlin lights up as she speaks about his theory of the divided brain, on how the two hemispheres have two modes of paying attention to the world, and two different perspectives.

‘I’m often exploring this conjunction between circles and squares – between cubes that rotate or, in this case, a revolving circular form within a very cuboid, rectilinear, formal environment,’ Devlin says. ‘At some level, you could say that the circle resonates through all of us, probably because it relates to our planet. Whereas the roots of the square form might have more to do with everything humanity has imposed on the planet: physical structures, architectural structures, legal systems, penal codes – you know, everything we’ve designed.’

Part of the installation will feature collective readings, including excerpts from The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, voiced by British actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Devlin herself will contribute readings from Agnesi’s writings. Visitors are also invited to browse and donate books to expand this public archive – books that will be integrated into the Milan Library System and continue their journey in the hands of new readers. According to Devlin, people remember how they felt when they received a piece of information more than the information itself. That’s why her work always seeks to fuse knowledge with emotion: ‘What’s really a privilege about being invited to create a public artwork in a place where people can move around freely is that, when you see a public artwork in a site like this, its trace always stays with you in the future – even when it’s gone.’

Her installation is designed to leave a lasting impression. The angled mirrored plane at the top of the cylindrical bookshelf in her library can reflect the sun’s light, so the experience will change depending on the time of day you visit: ‘Daytime is going to be great, but in the evening, oh! During the evenings, something special happens.’

After dark, visitors are invited to stay beyond the usual 7.15pm closing time to witness light streaming from the library, casting poetic shadows across the courtyard’s columns and statues. ‘The birds start singing in a very particular way as dusk sets in,’ says Devlin. ‘Light and shade become very distinct, the sky turns a particularly deep blue, and the lights of the library really start to contrast against it. It’s truly a magical moment.’

‘Library of the Light’ by Es Devlin is on view at Pinacoteca di Brera until 21 April 2025

Salone del Mobile 2025 takes place 8-13 April. Check our full Milan Design Week 2025 guide for the must-sees

Welcome to Wallpaper’s annual Design Awards issue, a fixture of our editorial calendar (this is its 21st year), but also a hugely valuable, time-stamped appraisal of the very best the world has to offer in terms of fashion, technology, architecture, interiors, travel and art.

As ever, the Wallpaper* team has been both avid in their appreciation and acute in their adjudication of each of our winners; mindful, too, that applying a ‘time stamp’ to achievement is necessarily limiting.

After all, truly great design isn’t for a month or a year, but has the potential to permanently alter our direction of travel, affecting lives in ways that might take a little time to comprehend. It’s with this in mind that we decided to shake up the awards process itself (and I would personally like to express gratitude to the 100-plus creatives who have, over two decades, lent their shoulder to the judging wheel) in order to bring a fresh perspective to our selections.

Choosing the Wallpaper* 2025 Design Award winners

Our editors have thus taken full ownership of this year’s winners’ enclosure, stipulating not only who won, but why and how they achieved their award.

To add further context, we asked five leading figures from across the creative industries to pen their own appraisal of what counts – and what doesn’t – in a world both buffeted by, and borne aloft on, seismic societal, technological and cultural change. I’d like to thank Es Devlin, Ilse Crawford, Lesley Lokko, Sou Fujimoto and Yves Behar for taking the time to share their thoughts, the Wallpaper* team for their diligence and insights, and all the winners for satisfying our insatiable appetite for the new, the novel and the next.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Es Devlin’s large-scale choral installation, Congregation, opening in London tonight (3 October 2024), considers themes of displacement, personal bias and separation in an immersive celebration of the power of acoustemology (sound as a way of knowing). Devlin, who for the project has teamed with UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s national charity partner, will be showcasing 50 portraits of Londoners who have been forcibly displaced from their home. The free and open-to-all exhibition at 18th-century church St Mary le Strand, curated by Wallpaper* contributing editor Ekow Eshun, is accompanied by choral music performed each evening outside the church.

For Devlin, who invited the subjects of her chalk and charcoal portraits to her home for their sittings, the experience was an emotional one.

‘The doorbell would ring, and I would know the first name of the person and that was it,’ says Devlin. ‘But I purposely did not know anything else. They knew the set-up – they walked in, had a cup of tea, sat down, and I immediately put the music on [Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons]. I said, “We're not going to talk yet, but I do want you to look straight into my eyes. And if it's uncomfortable, then when I'm not looking at you, look around the room, but whenever I'm looking in your eyes, please look back at me”, which is an odd thing to do for 45 minutes.’

After the time was up, Devlin paused the music to conduct an interview, with the sitter sharing their story and revealing how they came to be in London, whether it was decades ago, as a child, or weeks ago on a small boat. The drawing then resumed while the conversation continued, with Devlin taking photos before the sitter left to enable her to complete the work alone.

‘By the time we got to that moment of telling the story, there was a real sense of relief. They were relieved to tell me who they were. I would feel really anxious about doing them justice and getting them right.’

After studying the person’s appearance for 45 minutes, Devlin was forced to confront her unconscious bias and assumptions about who they were upon hearing their story. ‘The picture would sit there while we did the interview, just accusing me. With Maya [Ghazal], I had never drawn a woman in a hijab before, and I got really involved in this beautiful woman, how the hijab went exactly there, how the light came through. Of course, we did the interview and she said, “Right, I'm a commercial pilot. I fly 737s.” And I just felt like such an idiot. What was I doing, faffing about with her hijab when I should be on her pilot's black, chunky watch? If I'd known she was a pilot, I would have gone on about the watch. But you don't have access to this information, so you go to what your associations are, and that's what I really wanted to draw attention to myself. I thought if it's in me, it'll be in everyone.’

In the drawings, subjects are pictured holding a box that contains a projected animated sequence that they have created. Devlin views the resulting works as co-authored, the result of a dialogue between herself and the participant that subverts a mainstream narrative. By each sitter being viewed through a shared lens, the external and objectifying gaze is eschewed, giving a face and a voice to the persecuted and the voiceless.

In choosing to create these images in haunting charcoal and chalk, Devlin draws on an emotive canon of portraiture inspired by Lucien Freud’s sketchbooks, as well as Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits, which were on show at the Courtauld earlier in the year. She views Congregation, with its sole focus on the inhabitants of London, as a sister work to 2022’s Come Home Again, in which she presented drawings of London’s wildlife. ‘This piece is not about all the world's refugees,’ Devlin adds. ‘This piece is really about London. I think that the best way into the general and the universe is to be very particular, so in this case, it is about a very specific community. And what I would say about this community that came in and out of my doors here is, this is us. This is London.’

Es Devlin will unveil Congregation, a new large-scale choral installation she has created in partnership with UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s national charity partner, at St Mary le Strand from 3 – 9 October 2024. The work, has been developed in collaboration with King’s College London in partnership with The Courtauld.

The work will be free and open to the public daily from 10am till 6pm, with free public choral performances within the surrounding pedestrianised area of The Strand outside The Courtauld at 7pm each evening, from Thursday 3 October until Wednesday 9 October, to coincide with Frieze London 2024

stmarylestrand.com

‘I'm fascinated by how we are intertwined with our technology,’ says Es Devlin when we meet at her London studio to discuss her partnership with BMW, with whom she is debuting a new series of installations set to debut at Art Basel 2024 (13-16 June).

‘BMW genuinely want to facilitate an actual meeting of minds, and that's what attracted me to this collaboration, which we have been talking about since 2017,’ she adds. ‘We have been waiting to find a genuine overlap of my lines of inquiry with their lines of inquiry. And this is the one.’ For her new works, encompassing sound, music and light, Devlin has been inspired by her time with BMW’s engineers and their work to make hydrogen a prime energy source for their electric vehicles. ‘It started with these conversations with the engineers, and then the work you see at the booth [in Art Basel] is very personal, looking back to my first memory, which was this line of light through water. That's how we begin the work in Basel. So I feel that the collaboration has allowed me to really continue my journey as an artist, as well as overlapping with these engineers.’

This intertwining of the artistic with the scientific isn’t new for Devlin, who has embraced a mish-mash of mediums and references throughout her career. Here, she looks to the scientific process itself, translating the potential of the electric BMW iX5 Hydrogen – which uses the energy from hydrogen itself to drive the motor, alongside a specially developed battery – into artworks that explore human and scientific progress. ‘Hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the universe,’ says Devlin, who studied the hydrogen fuel cell technology that enables the car to draw oxygen as it’s driven, and reconnect it with hydrogen to create energy. ‘And at the same time, the other thing you generate is water. It blew my mind that what is coming out of the exhaust pipe is water.’

Devlin builds on both this technology and the culturally eclectic foundations that underpin all her work for the series of multimedia pieces she has created for BMW. It includes two new works: Surfacing (2024) is a collaboration with choreographer Sharon Eyal that plays on light, music and water. A playful exploration of the fluid boundaries of walls of water, it becomes a magic show, drawing the eye with a trick of the light before surprising and delighting the viewer; in Surfacing II (2024) painted televisions offer a mash-up of the digital and the traditional, a haunting recontextualising of the human figure. ‘With painting TVs, you only get one go at it. I did lots of practice before, with these big brush strokes on Perspex. I had seen Frank Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads and it set me on this path. This meeting between the burnt charcoal, the chalk in our hands, the TV and the technology, the pixels and the flow of it. And the water, because this was filmed through very slow water.’ 

The car itself has also been subject to paintings, with the exterior decorated with the literature and imagery that inspired Devlin throughout her childhood, including Katsushika Hokusai’s 1831 woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa and handwritten extracts from James Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘I was already thinking about painting on the TVs and how I'd create these layers,’ says Devlin. ‘So that's what's painted on the side of the car. They took those paintings and literally translated them into print. In my practice of stage design, we work with models, with miniatures. I thought that [created] quite an interesting relationship between the human and the car. The human is able to hold the [model] car in their hand, able to twist it around and to decide where the paint goes, not being overwhelmed by not being able to see the whole system. That's why I like working with miniatures.’

Inside the car, passengers listen to a conversation between Devlin and the engineers, discussing hydrogen’s awesome potential. ‘It’s the theatre in the back of the car, this conflation between technology and humans, trying to make life for humans actually work. These engineers are the future – they are the ones sitting there coming up with the innovations.’

SURFACING: Visitors can sign up to book their seat at the hourly rituals here. Thursday 13 June - Sunday 16 June 2024, Art Basel in Basel, Hall 1.1, Messeplatz 10, 4005 Basel, Switzerland

Straddling the worlds of high-brow opera and pop-culture fashion, British polymath Es Devlin has spent the last three decades forging a path all her own. Whether developing an immersive spatial and aural installation for Prada or a tech-forward backdrop for Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour, with the staging of James Graham's Dear England play at The National Theatre in between – and a recent contribution to U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere – the highly sought-after designer transcends definition. 

Devlin’s ability to map light, project film on kinetic sculpture, and more recently introduce AI within her own creative ideation all stem from a deeply personal and interpretative yet relatable approach. Though harnessing the latest technology, her installations remain tactile and physically engaging.

‘An Atlas of Es Devlin’ at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A new exhibition at New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum highlights the designer’s meteoric rise. On view until 11 August 2024, ‘An Atlas of Es Devlin’ highlights a vast array of process materials: maquettes, sketches, material samples, photographs, notations, and even standalone artworks: school year paintings along with more recent ones.

Andrea Lipps, associate curator of contemporary design and head of the digital curatorial department at Cooper Hewitt, worked closely with the talent to sift through extensive archives and select the most interesting elements. For Devlin, the show and accompanying monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin – a sizable tome published by Thames & Hudson, UK – came together as a kind of atlas, a collection of maps. The book features over 700 colour images documenting 120 projects, Devlin’s personal commentaries, and interviews with collaborators Benedict Cumberbatch, Brian Eno, Sam Mendes, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alice Rawsthorn, Carlo Rovelli, Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye, Lyndsey Turner, and Pharrell Williams.

Like the comprehensive publication, the exhibition pinpoints her personal and commissioned work in areas as diverse as art, activism, poetry, music, dance, and sculpture. Devlin’s clients have included the World Expo, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, the Olympic Games, and U2. As of late, her public sculptures have addressed the urgency of climate change and the plight of endangered species. Much of the talent’s preliminary process centres on reading and drawing.

'I have spent 30 years translating words into images and spaces – transforming texts on a page into kinetic sculptures that encompass viewers with light and song and use magic to alter their perspective,' says Devlin. 

'My craft is to imagine worlds that don’t yet exist, to invite audiences to practice “interbeing” within psychological architectures they have not previously inhabited, to remind viewers that they are not separate but connected to one another and to the biosphere. For this exhibition, I have gathered the drawings, fragile paper sculptures and small-scale revolving cardboard models that I and my studio team have been making over the past three decades, a miniature parallel practice at the root of the large-scale public performance and installation works.'

'An Atlas of Es Devlin' is on view until 11 August 2024

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
2 E 91st St
New York

cooperhewitt.org
esdevlin.com

The accompanying monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin, is available on to buy on Amazon

Welcome to the Gucci Cosmos: a travelling exhibition from the 102-year-old Italian house that lands in London tomorrow (11 October 2023). The show transforms 180 Studios, at brutalist landmark 180 The Strand, into an immersive exploration of the house archive, curated by Italian fashion critic Maria Luisa Frisa to recall the celestial patterns found in constellations and time travel through the house’s past, present and future. 

Arriving to coincide with Frieze Week (Frieze London 2023 opens for previews on 11 October, the fair’s 20th anniversary), the exhibition was shown in its first iteration in June 2023 in Shanghai, China, featuring dramatic set pieces by Es Devlin and an expansive array of objects from the Gucci archive. Devlin returns once again for Gucci Cosmos in London (hot on the heels of her contribution to U2’s show at the Las Vegas Sphere), the British artist and set designer creating various ‘worlds’ in the exhibition space – from gleaming corridors evocative of surreal clothing archives to a room filled with floating flowers and bees to evoke Gucci’s signature ‘Flora’ motif.

Inside Gucci Cosmos at 180 Studios, London

The exhibition begins, though, with a simulacrum of what is arguably the birthplace of Gucci: the red-lacquered elevator of the Savoy Hotel, where house founder Guccio Gucci worked as bell boy as a young man at the end of the 19th century. There, he witnessed the growing need for luggage among the upper classes in a fast-changing world (as the Gucci Cosmos guides elucidated, the lift was the first of its kind in London and took seven minutes to ascend its heights, during which guests would be served drinks and entertained with music). It was an experience he brought back to Florence, where he founded Gucci as a luggage maker in 1921 (today its artisans are trained at the nearby Gucci ArtLab), and the house’s origins are nodded to at Gucci Cosmos with a recreation of the Santa Maria del Fiore church’s Brunelleschi-designed dome sitting at the exhibition’s street-level entranceway. 

A labyrinthine series of revolving doors leads the viewer through the exhibition’s various rooms and worlds, which often feature immersive elements. ‘Portal’ looks once again towards the brand’s origins in travel with a gently rotating luggage belt – complete with suitcases, trunks and hat boxes, both archival and from recent designers at the house – while ‘Zoetrope’ evokes photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 moving-image invention with swirling footage of horses that emerge as apparitions across equestrian-inspired pieces from Gucci’s various eras.

'Two', meanwhile, sees a pair of enormous white resin figures – each lying sideways and inspired by the sense of wonder evoked by Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels – projected with historic men’s and women’s Gucci tailoring. ‘Archivio’ and ‘Cabinet of Wonders’ – perhaps the exhibition’s pinnacles – are designed to capture the feeling of entering the house’s archive, with a series of shelves and vitrines encasing precious Gucci objects. Finally, ‘Carousel’ is a journey through the house’s various creative directors – Ford to Alessandro Michele, Frida Giannini to current creative director Sabato de Sarno – staged as ’a fashion show that neither portrays a collection nor a season, but rather how Gucci has marked the rhythm of the times.’

The exhibition’s last display – also added for the London edition of Gucci Cosmos – is a look towards the future of the house under De Sarno, who showed his first collection as creative director this past September in Milan. Immersed in red, a colour that De Sarno has said will be central to his tenure – inspired by the red walls of The Savoy lift – a central screen shows a visual collage of the Italian designer’s inspirations, from fragments of poetry to flashing images of oceans, candles, explosions, and cities. Like his debut collection, the room is titled ‘Gucci Ancora’, an Italian word which translates to  ‘also now, also then’. Gucci calls the term ‘a heraldic adage that moves time forward.’

’It’s not something you lost,’ explains De Sarno, who attended the exhibition preview. ‘It’s something that you still have, but you want more of it, because it makes you happy.’

Gucci Cosmos runs at 180 Studios, 180 The Strand, London from 11 October to 31 December 2023.

gucci.com

Las Vegas wants to reclaim its title as the heavyweight entertainment capital of the planet. In the ring is the Sphere (officially known as The Sphere at The Venetian Resort), a $2.3 billion venue developed by the Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. Capable of housing 18,600 people, the structure was designed by Populous Architects and is envisaged as the first of a series of new generation venues to be built around the world (the second, planned for London’s Stratford, is currently on hold).

Over a five-year development process, MSG Sports’ team has hunted far and wide for content creators that can showcase the Sphere’s audio-visual scale and quality. The job of inaugurating this technical wonder has been taken up by U2, the Irish band with unrivalled experience of elaborate staging to accompany their epic soundscapes. Willie Williams, a longtime U2 collaborator, was tasked with shaping the show, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, which will run 29 September – 16 December 2023 (read our U2 in Las Vegas review). 

The making of U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere

‘Nothing like this has ever existed before,’ Williams tells us from the midst of last-minute preparations for the opening night. ‘It’s the confluence of art, science and diplomacy,’ he adds, hinting at the huge number of moving parts – both human and mechanical – needed to get the event off the ground. 

For Williams, massive complexity has been a large part of his professional life. The first U2 show he worked on was the ‘War’ tour in 1983, and since then he has overseen 11 major global tours, pioneering many aspects of the modern stadium spectacle along the way, from the brooding atmospherics of the original Joshua Tree tour in 1987 through to the eerily prescient collision of imagery that served as the backdrop to the Zoo TV Tour, which wended its way around the world from 1992 to 1993. 

‘I won’t lie to you,’ the designer admits, ‘I wasn’t enthusiastic initially when the premise came up.’ The opportunity arose when Bono heard advance word of the Sphere’s construction and the potential for a set shaped around Achtung Baby’s 30th anniversary coalesced with the idea of not taking a huge and complex machine out on the road in the post-Covid era. Nevertheless, the U2 team has been up against the building’s stalled completion programme, as well as the need for the space to accommodate the other premiere attraction, Darren Aronofsky’s immersive cinematic experience Postcard From Earth, which opens on 6 October. Everything about the show started from an unknown. 

This was a perfect match for the band’s finely honed ethos. ‘The technology has ebbed and flowed over the years,’ Williams says, ‘but U2’s vision has always been about pioneering – occupying space that no one else has thought of.’ It has been a long road to the stage of the Sphere, a journey not without its creative difficulties. ‘It wasn’t until around February that Edge said we’d cracked the code,’ recalls Williams, as the creative team initially struggled with a space that was both a constraint – no corners – and also a literal blank canvas. 

Characterised by a 90m tall circular exterior, covered in an LED screen, the Sphere contains a steeply raked auditorium, with the focal stage enveloped with a wraparound screen. Billed as the largest LED screen in the world, it comprises 268,435,456 pixels, the equivalent of 72 HD televisions. As the press pack points out, ‘every minute of content produced for Sphere is the equivalent of one hour of streaming television’. 

‘The quantity of data is mind-boggling,’ Williams confirms. ‘It means we’re effectively working at a 12K screen resolution (the Aronofsky film is at 16K), and each single frame of animation took around 15 minutes to render.’ It’s a far cry from the world of 1997’s PopMart, when Williams and his team oversaw the world's then-largest LED screen, a 50m structure that stretched the full width of the stage. 

Throughout U2’s performance history, screens have been both backdrop and structure, a three-dimensional canvas through which the audience experiences the music and imagery. Over the years, that imagery has been conjured up by a number of significant creative collaborators, including Brian Eno, Kevin Godley and Anton Corbijn. There was also a long-running partnership with the late architect Mark Fisher, who gave shape, structure and colour to these multimedia spectaculars, and whose company, Stufish (behind ABBA Arena), continues to play a major role. Starting with the Experience + Innocence Tour in 2015, the artist and stage designer Es Devlin has also been a key player in U2's creative arsenal.

For U2:UV, Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, the roster expanded still further, with a section overseen by the masters of cinematic illusion, Industrial Light and Magic. There’s also input from Eno, once again, along with installations by video artists Marco Brambilla and John Gerrard and a specially commissioned piece by Devlin. The starting point for the show is the 1991 album. ‘With [2017’s] Joshua Tree Tour, I was very surprised they wanted to do an album-based show,’ Williams recalls, ‘but the band looked at it as if it was an all-new album, while Anton made all the films. There was absolutely nothing nostalgic about it.’ 

A similar approach has been taken in Las Vegas. Achtung Baby has aged well. Marking the end of the band’s rootsy, rock’n’roll imperialism phase, it dived into new technologies, both sonically and visually, helping define the first decade of full-on media overload and global disruption – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the rise of the information age.

The accompanying tour, Zoo TV, with its suspended Trabants and scattered screens showing live and pre-recorded footage, was a deliberate bombardment of imagery, created in collaboration with Eno, artists Mark Pellington and Catherine Owens and others. Some of that unique imagery will resurface. ‘Initially, I didn’t think we’d revisit the Zoo TV era, because in the past 30 years, the entire world has gone that way,’ says Williams, ‘but the visual language still felt thrilling and fresh.’

Even working with the new sound system required a departure from convention. Built by German AV specialist Holoplot (who also worked on David Hockney’s Lightroom installation in London), the system consists of a vast matrix of speakers – 167,000 in total – seamlessly integrated behind the screen. ‘Even when Bono is talking from the stage it feels very conversational,’ Williams says, ‘it’s a very different sonic experience, very precise.’ 

U2’s longstanding sound designer Joe O’Herlihy has been closely involved with translating the ‘sonically dense’ Achtung Baby mixes into this new audio environment. Even producer Steve Lillywhite, a longtime U2 collaborator, was on board to advise. ‘An early decision that I made that really saved me was to bring everybody here,’ Williams says, pointing out that practically his entire team temporarily relocated to Las Vegas. 

The show is broken into three parts, starting with Achtung Baby, then on to songs taken from this year’s Songs of Surrender album, which features revisited and reworked tracks from the band’s copious discography. For this section, the physical stage setting comes into itself. A scaled-up version of Brian Eno’s Turntable, a fully-function deck originally shown at Paul Stolper Gallery in London, it promises a unique light show. ‘It almost started as a joke, but we quickly realised it would be brilliant,’ says Williams. Just like the original, the stage Turntable cycles through an ever-changing series of ‘colourscapes’, generated by an algorithm. 

The final section dips into the most richly anthemic seam of U2’s back catalogue. ‘Es has made a couple of wonderful pieces to close the show, and there’s work by John Gerrard and ILM as well,’ he says. ‘The building is a canvas we’ve been given, so we have to use it. So we don’t just deliver fireworks, we blow up the whole building.’ In this section, the full cinematic potential of the Sphere is unleashed. ‘It would be rude not to,’ Williams concedes. ‘Although simple graphics work really well, you can completely shapeshift the room.’

For the band themselves, this run of shows offered an opportunity to broaden and strengthen long-running creative partnerships. ‘We were looking around for a way of memorialising and celebrating Achtung Baby,’ says Adam Clayton, who started U2 with schoolfriends Paul Hewson (aka Bono), David Evans (the Edge), and Larry Mullen Jr in 1976. ‘Zoo TV had predated reality TV, fake news, social media – all these things. Bono had heard about this new venue in Vegas with nearly 20,000 seats, custom sound and an incredible screen that was akin to the whole audience having a VR experience. In the post-Covid era, it was appealing not to have to travel every night.’ 

After assembling the U2 family, work began on how to bring the space to life. ‘We’d had demos of the immersion, but there was still around eight months of pre-production work before we could even get in the building,’ Clayton adds, explaining that the Sphere’s bespoke acoustic design posed a number of challenges. ‘You don’t have to be very loud,’ he explains. ‘Whereas it’s much more broad strokes in an arena. As a result, I found I had to concentrate much more – I really have to lock in. You can practically hear the musicians think, and I think we’re playing better as a band [as a result].’ Ultimately, Clayton acknowledges that this is an experiment, but a worthy one. ‘It’s a new way of experiencing music, especially for the younger fans.’ 

This sense of the rock show as a grand ritual rings especially true for Es Devlin. This year marks ten years of the artist and stage designer’s collaboration with the band, starting with work on what became the Experience + Innocence Tour. For Devlin, whose work spans a vast spectrum from pure pop spectacle to land art, sculpture, installation (including Come Home Again at Tate Modern in 2022), fashion and theatre, one of the first things to celebrate is helping to launch Sphere onto the world stage. ‘It’s quite a privilege to be inaugurating a building,’ she says. ‘It’s quite a sacred thing.’ (The following week she flies to Manchester to oversee a piece inaugurating OMA’s Factory International.)  

In the long run-up to the show, Devlin and the rest of creative team – ‘a really tight-knit group’ – began by brainstorming visual concepts of how to treat the space. Devlin admits that she knew a fair bit about the Sphere in advance, noting that ‘every UK and American creative team had been invited to have a look at it – everybody has been sharpening their minds for this space’.  The vision that took shape takes the audience on a journey through materiality and light and shadow, exploring the limits of what the screen could make possible. 

‘We considered the show to be a little bit like a group art show,’ Devlin says, at pains to point out that although U2 acts as a catalyst, creativity is never imposed. ‘When you have a band as confident in their craft and purpose and status as they are, they’re just so profoundly unthreatened,’ she says. ‘It means they are genuine collaborators who have spent many years engaged with culture. They truly value the work of the artists they engage with.’

‘The amount of trust the band has put in me is incredible,’ Willie Williams admits. ‘It has felt like we’ve had to do the biggest art project in the history of our species whilst running a three-legged obstacle course.’ For Williams, the relationship with U2 continues to push his creative buttons, even if the route and destination have been unconventional. ‘This is someone else’s video surface and we’ll be followed by countless others. I’m just used to starting with hardware,’ he adds. ‘It’ll be a learning curve to see how humans respond to this unique situation – it’s a real dance between intimacy and spectacle.’ 

Alongside new iterations of John Gerrard’s series of 'flags', art contributions include Devlin’s ‘Nevada Ark’, a kaleidoscopically dense animated catalogue of the state’s threatened species. There’s also Brambilla’s ‘playful, kitsch’ piece ‘King Size’, which accompanies the song ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’. Brambilla’s contribution evolved from an AR project that used AI-generated Elvises, a familiar Vegas touch point. 

‘Elvis’ rise and fall mirrors the rise and fall of America, in a way,’ Clayton muses, before adding that if there’s one theme that runs through the entire show, it’s the relationship between the consumer economy and climate change. ‘It’s not obvious or straightforward,’ says Clayton, ‘but the art and artists have created a narrative that embodies the idea of community. We’re all part of the problem and the solution.’ 

The Sphere itself could be read as a symbol of the post-capitalist panopticon, a literal screen on which to project our hopes and fears. Devlin, for one, is sanguine about the resources expended to create the venue and the show, explaining that sustainability is about preserving the spaces and rituals that are most precious. ‘I want to sustain the kind of life where we can all gather together and sing,’ she says, describing the artist as a conduit for communal emotional experiences or rituals. Is the Sphere a modern cathedral? ‘I could see a return to a form of regular communal weekly gathering,’ she says. ‘We need it like we need air. Urgently.’

We ask Clayton if the band ever stops to consider its cultural legacy. ‘Yes. We’ve always had very involved creative people around us,’ he replies. ‘For example, Brian Eno had a huge influence on the band, from The Unforgettable Fire onwards. We very much trust our creative department. I’m happy to report that all the gambles and rolls of the dice have paid off.’ 

Jonathan Bell has since attended the show's opening night – read his U2 in Las Vegas review.

U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, 29 September – 16 December 2023, TheSphereVegas.com, VenetianLasVegas.com

U2.com, WillieWilliams.com, EsDevlin.com, MarcoBrambilla.com, 

STUFISH.com, HOLOPLOT.com

‘An Atlas of Es Devlin’ is a a compendium of the work of stage sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Es Devlin; over 900 pages of sketches, photographs and interviews covering her lifelong practice. 

Coinciding with the installation of the artist’s 30-year archive at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the book is an attempt to capture the breadth of her titanic career, published by Thames and Hudson. From teenage drawings and paintings, to her colossal stages designed for pop icons like Beyonce, U2 and The Weeknd, the volume chronicles Devlin’s extraordinary rise and explosive vision; charting not only the scale, but developing intentions of her practice. 

'An Atlas of Es Devlin' book

Describing her sets as ‘instruments of communication’, Devlin works to sculpt experiences for an audience through a detailed process of sketching, paper cutting and model making, captured throughout the book’s 300 colour reproductions and 130 pages of personal commentary texts composed by the artist. For anyone wanting to glean an insight into how cutting edge stage design evolves from inception to jaw dropping finality, the book offers a comprehensive account of the artist’s major projects; including the London 2012 Olympic Closing Ceremony, 2022 Super Bowl half-time show with Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar, and the Beyoncé Renaissance Tour 2023.

These are embellished with in-depth interviews with her many ‘collaborators’ (Devlin preferring the term over ‘clients’), including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pharrell Williams, Brian Eno, and many more. Throughout these conversations and the wider volume, the artist details her views on the audience as a form of ‘temporary society’, her current engagement with the cultural response to our climate and civilizational crisis, and the dialogue between music, poetry and the physical manifestation of ideas in her sculpture. 

Working to foster ‘intimacy on a grand scale’, Devlin’s art connects a profoundly personal vision, her unique voice, with the cheering community of thousands in her audience. If anything can be gleaned from studying the tome, it’s her gift for exciting and enhancing the collective, as they bask in the light of her stage.

This power comes from her ability to channel her collaborators’ ideas, and myriad influences from drama, visual art, poetry and opera libretti; all focused into the execution and elaboration of marvellous visions for what performance can be. Devlin’s hand can be seen on all levels of her productions; whether designing for theatre, opera, stadium concerts or ceremonies, her vision extends from the minute to the macro, and is informed by the totality of this broad experience. 

As the editor of An Atlas, Andrea Lipps, explains: 'It is impossible to pin Es Devlin to a singular title. She is polymathic. She is a storyteller, an artist, a designer, a director, a poet, a visionary, perhaps even a shaman, whose work razes through disciplinary boundaries.'

An Atlas of Es Devlin will be released on 19th October 2023, and is available for preorder via Amazon

While New York City is aglow with many state-of-the-art public installations every holiday season, one piece stands head and shoulders above the rest this year: Es Devlin’s illuminated revolving sculpture, Your Voices, which has just been unveiled at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Commissioned by champagne house Moët & Chandon, Your Voices is situated on Josie Robertson Plaza, the public square that serves as a gateway to the Lincoln Center’s constituent indoor performance venues, including the Metropolitan Opera House. Stretched among the sculpture’s structural arcs are 700 glowing cords, representing the 700 languages currently spoken in New York City – the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. 

An accompanying soundscape, created by Polyphonia, weaves together some of these languages, from Algerian Arabic, Alsatian, Azeri and Ashanti to Zapotec, Zarma and Zulu, all citing a memorable line from EM Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End: ‘Only connect, and live in fragments no longer.’

‘The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’ observation, “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities,”’ says Devlin, who previously explored the theme of linguistic diversity in her installation for the Tate Modern Garden in London, titled Come Home Again.

She continues, ‘The viewer’s perspective is spliced and framed by the shifting strands of the sculpture as it turns, evoking the way our perspectives are enriched and shaped by experiencing the linguistic structures and identities of others.’

Visitors to Your Voices are encouraged to learn about the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit documenting and protecting Indigenous, minority and endangered languages in New York City and beyond, which collaborated on Devlin’s piece.

As with Devlin’s London installation, Your Voices will play host to multilingual choral performances over the course of its display. The featured choral groups, ranging from Ukrainian Village Voices to the Harlem Japanese Gospel Choir, have been selected by the Lincoln Center for their unique voices and languages. Performances, which are free and open to the public, take place every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening at 6pm, until and including 18 December 2022.

Beyond inviting viewers to consider the cultural, historical and biological knowledge that exists in languages, Your Voices is a celebration of human connection and an expression of generosity – values that are important in all seasons, but resonate particularly at this time of the year.

The performance calendar for Your Voices (on view until 18 December 2022) can be accessed at lincolncenter.org. Tickets are not required and admission is first-come, first-served.

Approached from the south, Es Devlin’s new public artwork in the Tate Modern Garden appears as an architectural homage, a monumental scale model of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, right across the Thames from Christopher Wren’s original. In Devlin’s piece – titled Come Home Again, and commissioned by Cartier, the dome has been sliced open to reveal its cross-section, brilliantly illuminated and adorned from tip to toe with cut-out sketches of moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish and fungi. At its base are steps that lead up to choral risers, inviting passers-by to immerse themselves in Devlin’s pencil-drawn wildlife.

By day, Come Home Again is a place for contemplation and learning. Stepping into the dome allows the visitor to examine the drawings up close – there are 243 in total, representing the 243 priority species identified by the London Biodiversity Action Plan as declining in numbers in the capital and thus in need of conservation action. In lieu of the prayer books that one might expect in a place of worship, Devlin has placed QR codes that link to a guide to all the species. Just as important is the soundscape, created by Devlin’s habitual music collaborators Jade Pybus and Andy Theakstone, and interspersing recordings of various choirs singing the Latin names of the priority species with the animals’ actual sounds. Every few minutes, the glorious cacophony fades and Devlin’s voice emerges to introduce one of the species. She says its common and Latin names, and brings up a nugget of information that helps us remember the animal. We learn, for instance, that the swift (Apus apus) can fly the equivalent of eight trips to the moon and back in its lifetime.

‘I want to help people learn the names of these animals,’ explains Devlin as we speak in her south London studio two weeks ahead of Come Home Again’s unveiling.

‘Once you know their names, you make a place for them in your imagination – it’s like the memory palace. And you’ll always think of them differently.’

Even for an artist and designer who is used to being in the limelight (Devlin’s portfolio includes stage sets for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Kanye West and U2, as well as Olympic ceremonies in London and Rio), Come Home Again is a project of great prominence. Tate Modern is among London’s most visited attractions, and even more people pass by its riverfront each day – so the museum is very selective about what it allows to be placed in the garden. The site also has personal significance to Devlin, a native Londoner: ‘For me, Tate Modern is emblematic of a real shift in British culture: its opening coincided with a shift in our character as a country and city, with New Labour and the rise of the YBAs. Suddenly British culture was significant on the world stage, when it hadn’t been for many years.’

The view of St Paul’s from the Tate Modern Garden makes the cathedral a natural starting point for a site-specific commission, but it was a conversation a few years ago with Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, that spurred Devlin to join the dots between the two spaces. ‘He said, “Es, you should think about the connection between St Paul’s as a seat of ancient ecclesiastical power, and the Tate as a seat of historical industrial power [the museum building was once the Bankside Power Station], and now a seat of contemporary cultural power. Consider that convergence of energies and think about what you might do”,’ Devlin recalls, as we pore over sketches and renderings of Come Home Again.

Around the same time as her conversation with Evans, Devlin was discovering books on eco-philosophy – encouraged by the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alice Rawsthorn, and facilitated by the Amazon algorithm. The latter led her to the two most important volumes influencing her worldview and practice today: David Abram’s Becoming Animal (‘he talks a lot about magic, and how we can shift our perceptions if we just interrupt our usual ways of seeing things’, she recaps.), and Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self. ‘Macy invites you to consider where your self ends, invites you to recognise that you feel selfish, you feel a sense of self-preservation,’ says Devlin. ‘But what if where you considered self to reside was more expansive than just in your own body and in your own mind?’

Much of Devlin’s recent work reflects on Abram and Macy: there’s Forest for Change, which planted 400 trees within the courtyard of London’s Somerset House to raise awareness for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and similarly Conference of the Trees, which populated the New York Times’ Climate Hub at COP26 in Glasgow with 197 trees and plants. Her widely photographed and Instagrammed mirror labyrinth, Forest of Us, likewise carries an environmental message; in her words ‘it calls people’s attention to the connection between themselves and the planet’. Come Home Again, with its evocation of animal species which Devlin calls ‘non-human Londoners’, continues in this vein. ‘Humans went through a period of separation from the biosphere in order to learn more about it, in order to specialise. But now we need to reconnect, and come home again to our mutual planet,’ says Devlin, adding that the words ‘dome’ and ‘home’ share etymological roots.

In her bid to better connect with the 243 priority species, Devlin decided to draw each of them in pencil on paper, using photographs as reference material. ‘That kind of observational drawing has not been part of my practice since I was doing my art A-level, but I wanted this sense of submitting to the observation of a life that’s not my own,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t trying to be expressive. So my drawing of the bumblebee isn’t my interpretation of the bumblebee, but an effort to learn the bumblebee’s ways.’

It was a four-month process that involved a few 18-hour days, and gave Devlin ample opportunity to listen to podcasts about London wildlife, and wildlife in general. The fruits of her labour are evident in the ease with which she can now identify each species and rattle off factoids: she points out, for instance, that the streaked bombardier beetle was thought to be extinct until 85 of them were counted in the borough of Tower Hamlets, and has since become a subject in the artwork of Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Within Come Home Again, Devlin’s 243 sketches have been enlarged, printed on a sustainably sourced birch ply, cut out, and displayed across the dome’s cross-section, with strips of LEDs stuck on the back for illumination (these will go back to inventory after the exhibition). The structure is made in recycled steel and stretched fabric, and she’s opted for an environmentally friendly matte paint finish, all to keep the installation’s carbon footprint to a minimum and thus align with its message. 

Elegant and impactful as it is in the daytime, it is at sunset that Come Home Again truly comes to life. Each evening until 1 October, a London-based choral group will come to the installation and sing their interpretation of choral evensong, which members of the public can enjoy free of charge and without prior booking. Devlin got the idea from her visit to St Paul’s, where she observed the daily ritual that marks the moment as the day turns to evening: ‘listening to evensong, I thought, where else would you get this experience? They’re going to sing whether you turn up or not, so it’s not a performance. It’s actually a call to prayer, a relic of a time of matins, nones and vespers. You feel like you’re part of an ancient mode of telling time. Whoever you are, you can walk in and be surrounded by this extraordinary body of music.’

The choral lineup is illustrious and reflective of London’s cultural makeup, ranging from the award-winning Tenebrae, to the London Bulgarian Choir and the South African Cultural Gospel Choir UK. They will be singing in English, Latin, Bulgarian and Xhosa – ‘I’m interested in the parallel concerns of diminishing biodiversity and diminishing linguistic diversity,’ Devlin says. ‘We’re homogenising, and our ethnosphere has also been impoverished in parallel to the biosphere. There’s an extraordinary document on endangered languages, and how you feel when you read it is also how you feel when you see the last polar bear on the last floating bit of ice. I wanted to make that connection too.’ 

She is particularly looking forward to the performance by The Choir with No Name, a chorus for homeless and marginalised people to experience the joy of singing together. ‘I defy anyone not to cry on that night. Because we’re talking about homes, and here we have people who don’t have homes, singing their hearts out. I think it’s going to be incredibly moving.’

Devlin likes to include a clear call-to-action with each installation. So just as Forest of Us in Miami encouraged visitors to make a donation to Instituto Terra, a non-profit organisation dedicated to recovering the Atlantic Forest, Come Home Again encourages audiences to contribute to and engage with the London Wildlife Trust, which protects, conserves and enhances the capital’s wildlife and wild spaces.

It’s a cause that equally resonates with Cartier, with whom Devlin has a longstanding relationship (She cites the 2019 exhibition ‘Trees’ at Fondation Cartier, which brought together artists, botanists and philosophers, as an inspiration for her recent practice). Says Cyrille Vigneron, CEO of Cartier, ‘with Come Home Again, Es Devlin has created a unique and thought-provoking work of art, a choral sculpture representing how inspiring, yet fragile the beauty of the world can be, calling to preserve earth’s natural biodiversity.’

Ultimately, Come Home Again offers a message of hope, suggesting that if we take swift and decisive action to remedy past wrongs, we can return to a happier state of equilibrium with the planet. As Devlin says in the installation’s soundscape, quoting Joanna Macy: ‘May we turn inwards and stumble upon our true roots in the intertwining biology of this exquisite planet. [...] Now it can dawn on us. We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness, we can come home again.’

Come Home Again, until 1 October 2022 at the Tate Modern Garden, Bankside, London SE1, esdevlin.com, cartier.com, wildlondon.org.uk

Chanel No5 celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2021, and the brand has celebrated throughout the year with a variety of campaigns, events, and launches. 

The most recent, and certainly one of the most exciting, happenings it has staged is a new monumental labyrinth designed by artist and designer Es Devlin. 

Devlin is best known for her ‘stage sculptures’ that use a dazzling combination of built structures, lights, and sound to create environments that are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Her design for Chanel doesn’t disappoint, giving visitors an experience that feels as epic as Theseus’ fabled journey into the labyrinth. 

Those lucky enough to make it to Miami before the exhibit closes 21 December 2021, will have to parse their way through a forest to Devlin’s massive white labyrinth. From there, they will ascend a ramp that provides an ample view of the surrounding treetops, as well as a garden populated with the plants and flowers that make up Chanel No5. At the top of the ramp, visitors will find a sundial that indicates the passage of the sun overhead, as well as the 28 minutes it takes for the molecules of Chanel No5 to evaporate, according to their different molecular densities. 

After that, it is time to move into the labyrinth itself–a white-walled series of five concentric pathways, filled with light and a thumping soundscape designed by Devlin in collaboration with Chanel’s In-House Perfumer Olivier Polge. 

When creating the sculpture, Devlin was preoccupied with the interplay between the natural environment, the architecture that populates it, and the behaviour of the humans that populate them both. 

‘The word labyrinth originally referred to human movement: it was a dance before it became architecture,’ Devlin says. ‘If our behaviour can define out architecture, then perhaps art and architecture can alter our behaviour.’ 

‘If works of art can help us see ourselves as part of the biosphere and symbolically fused with it, if we can start to see plants and animals as equal protagonists as ourselves in life, I believe we have a better chance of making the fundamental behavioural shifts that are necessary not only to avoid climate chaos, but  also to live in a more just, equitable, ad joyful way,’ she explains.

Sustainability was also a key tenant of the project, titled Five Echoes. After the installation closes, all components of the labyrinth will be repurposed and recycled. While, the forest of over 1,000 plants, shrubs, and trees that make up the exhibit will be replanted in parks throughout Miami-Dade County. 

INFORMATION

chanel.com

Nicolas Ghesquière is something of an aesthetic archaeologist, mining myth and history in his designs for Louis Vuitton’s womenswear collections. His enthusiastic interest in the concept of time even extended to his maison's support of the 2020 ‘About Time: Fashion and Duration’ exhibiton at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which charted how sartorial associations across the years have transcended time to conflate the past, present and future. The show was designed by Es Devlin, who has collaborated with Ghesquière on almost all of his runway shows for Louis Vuitton's womenswear collections, and featured two enormous clock faces ticking away the minutes in two adjacent galleries.

Ghesquière's time-travelling approach was particularly prescient in his A/W 2021 collection for the French maison, which drew on antiquated objects and sculptures. Presented in Paris at the Louvre’s Denon wing, the catwalk show saw models intermingle with ancient Roman, Greek and Etruscan sculptures.

Louis Vuitton x Fornasetti: an archaelogical dig through the Italian design giant’s archives

Ghesquière was also drawn to the history of Fornasetti, digging into the Milanese design giant’s archives in order to source motifs idiosyncratic to the brand, ranging from architectural sketches and cameo portraits to antique coins and keys. The result is a collaborative collection of striking trompe l’oeil pieces, which encompasses ready-to-wear and accessories, collaged to pop-art effect with heritage Fornasetti designs.

Supple leather is reimagined as stone and Louis Vuitton’s signature ‘Capucines’ bag is printed with sketches of an Italianate edifice or a tessellation of worn classical busts. Fornasetti’s archival images are also complemented with motifs emblematic of the Louis Vuitton maison, including the ‘LV’ monogram.

This Louis Vuitton x Fornasetti collection fuses myth with modernity and fragments of the past with the future, a century-spanning collaboration that will allow you to sport a sliver of history wherever you stroll. 

INFORMATION

louisvuitton.com

The cavernous spaces inside the brutalist building 180 The Strand, now known as 180 Studios, have been animated with monumental, loud and flashy (often literally) experimental works in recent years, from Ryoji Ikeda’s test pattern right back to the unforgettable debut group show, ‘The Infinite Mix’. Devoted to new media art, the latest show to inhabit the central London site is no less ambitious or absorbing – but its subtlety might take viewers by surprise.

So says Dr Jiyoon Lee, curator of ‘LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art’, an exhibition of 13 new media art pieces by 12 artists and collectives working in radical ways – the likes of Random International, the collaborative group behind Rain Room, and the godmother of new media art Hito Steyerl are among the line-up. The works, including several new, never-seen-before commissions, make pioneering use of tech not commonly found in ruminative works of art: 3D projection mapping, neural networks, quantum computing, open-source VFX software, and algorithmic visualisation.

‘There is a big, and very important, movement at the moment towards experiential and immersive art, including teamLab, Superblue or the Arte Museum in Korea,’ Lee says. She is the director of SUUM Project, a curatorial platform for promoting innovative contemporary art practices, and spearheads the LG OLED Art: Self-Lit Gallery exhibition series. ‘There is an element of this in “LUX”, but, more importantly, we wanted to give a broad and global representation of how artists are currently working with all kinds of technology as part of their practice, in a way that has not been done before.’

Many of the works directly take on the show’s title – LUX being Latin for ‘light’. Es Devlin’s work, BLUESKYWHITE (commissioned by 180 Studios) transports the spectator-participant back to the 19th century, to the dimming of the sun that occurred in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815, an event that released more than 100 million tonnes of gas into the atmosphere and cooled the Earth by some 3 degrees Celsius. Devlin has built a 24m-long tunnel that envelops the visitor in an intense red glow, an emotive and ambivalent contemplation of the possibility of replicating the effects of the volcanic eruption that could save the planet from burning but would lead to the death of blue skies. 

As well as exploring light, movement and space through advanced technologies, ‘LUX’ pays homage to the little things we take for granted. The show was conceived partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘which has been a time of isolation and metaphorical darkness for so many people’, Lee explains.

One such example is Flower Meadow, by Swiss collective iart, commissioned by LG. Invited to create a work using OLED – wafer-thin, light-emitting panels, usually found in television and phone screens – but used by iart as a sculptural material. Flower Meadow consists of a non-fungible species of flowers that are nourished by AI that will renew and proliferate every day. 

In concert with this is Julianknxx’s 180 Studios-commissioned Black Corporeal (Between This Air), a short film Lee describes as ‘a beautiful, repetitive, and poetic sound piece, exploring the idea that our ability to breathe – an act that is continuously challenged by everything from air pollution, stress, anxiety and societal prejudice – is more than our lungs’ ability to take in air, but a reflection of the way we live individually and together’. Finding epiphany in the everyday, Julianknxx reminds us that everything is connected.

This is felt profoundly in artist a’strict’s multisensory installation Starry Beach: a luminescent space of scintillating waves, reminiscent of a star-studded sky at night. Starry Beach – the title recalling Starry Night, Van Gogh’s masterpiece – reconnects us with an age-old feeling of awe in the face of nature, a theme that has inspired artists for centuries. This is perhaps what makes ‘LUX‘ such a unique proposition: the works may employ the materials of the future, but their enduring subjects are rooted in classical artworks, tracing a trajectory that’s often ignored and suggesting there might be more to new media than holograms and flashing lights.

INFORMATION
‘LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art’, co-curated by SUUM and Fact, is on view 13 October – 18 December 2021 at 180 The Strand.

180thestrand.com

It’s an age-old complex for any creative: how to transform a groundbreaking abstract concept into a tangible piece of art. Renowned artist and designer Es Devlin might just have an answer by unlocking the door to her creative process. 

In a newly-launched lesson for educational streaming platform Masterclass, Devlin offers top tips on how to go from concept to concrete art. Devlin’s renowned large-scale sculptural installations and designs across music, theatre and visual arts have seen her create everything from installations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum to set designs for Beyoncé and The Weeknd. 

‘We should be part of a world where we aren't defined or diminished by narrow labels but can instead continue to grow and learn throughout our careers,’ Devlin says. ‘In my class, I will help members turn their ideas into something they can hold in their hand and encourage those that might meet a fork in the road and don't know which path to take to take both, and then take both again.’

Over two decades, Devlin has carved a corner as one of the most influential creatives of a generation. In performative sculptures and environments that fuse music, language and light, she collaborated with some of the world's most leading international artists, including Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, and U2, and traversed a range of disciplines including drama, dance and opera.

She was responsible for both the 2012 London Olympic Closing Ceremony and the 2016 Rio Olympic Opening Ceremony. Most recently, she took the role of artistic director of the London Design Biennale and created Forest for Change — a temporary forest in which visitors grew familiar with the UN global sustainability objectives at London's Somerset House.

The artist’s recipe for success involves two key ingredients: curiosity and research. The lesson will see her share her innovative processes for using light, sculpture and technology which tell compelling visual stories and leave audiences stunned. Focusing on case studies, Forest of Us (now on show at the new Superblue Miami) as well as her stage sculptures for The Weeknd and The Lehman Trilogy, Devlin will discuss the key to working effectively with collaborators, a core element of her practice. They will also learn to imagine the spectators as a collective mind, and how to conceive work that feels natural to create, and hard to forget.

INFORMATION

Es Devlin’s MasterClass is now available exclusively to subscribers. masterclass.com

‘A tale of two gardens,' says stage design supremo Es Devlin of the horticultural heritage of the Dior S/S 2022 menswear show set, a psychedelic landscape, part arid Texan desert, part pruned plot, which took three weeks to create at the Hôtel National des Invalides in Paris.

‘This is all started from Kim Jones’ initial sketch – a row of cacti transforming into roses,’ says Devlin, referring to the first set design drawing shared by the brand's men's artistic director Kim Jones. This image nodded to the floricultural foundation of the brand: the label is synonymous with the rose motif, the favourite flower of Christian Dior, who built a rose garden on the clifftop of his parent's seaside Villa Les Rhumbs in Granville, Normandy. The sketch also made a botanical connection to the Houston birthplace of the brand’s S/S 2022 collaborator, the rapper and style icon Travis Scott, whose record label is called Cactus Jack. ‘He really thought of them like desert jewels,' Devlin adds.

In an arid-meets-Edenic S/S 2022 runway landscape, giant roses and cacti sprout from rocky crags, where horned skulls of desert creatures scorch in the sun. Ornamental arches, alluding to the pergola at Christian Dior's childhood home, trail with blooming roses. Jones also looked to the maison's founder’s favourite flower for his debut S/S 2019 runway show, erecting 10m effigy designed by American graffiti artist Kaws, covered with a blooming bed of 70,000 peonies and roses. For an added psychedelic twist, meanwhile, the set for Dior S/S 2022 sprouted with spongy mushrooms.

‘Whether you come from Houston, from the land of cacti, or whether you come from the south of France, the land of fragrant roses, you can meet in the same place,' Devlin says of the imaginative outdoor environment of the Dior S/S 2022 show set, which also symbolises the creative synergy between the brand's heritage and contemporary collaborations. Green fingered design today defies convention and location.

INFORMATION

dior.com

Superblue, Miami’s new experimental art venue, has opened its doors. Located in a vast unused industrial building in the city’s Allapattah neighborhood, the space transforms 50,000 square foot into an immersive installation space, kicking off an inaugural programme with large-scale works from artists including Es Devlin, James Turrell and teamLab.

For Amsterdam-based artist studio DRIFT, the space affords the opportunity to reflect on nature’s growth processes through technology. Their new kinetic sculpture, Meadow, turns a traditional landscape on its head, with a careful choreography mimicking nature’s natural rhythms. Mechanical flowers, attuned to the entry of visitors, open and close when their sensors pick up on the tread of a visitor. This intuitively sets off a pattern of alternating speeds and colours, drawing all those who encounter Meadow into the performance.

The amalgamation of technological principles and natural rhythms which DRIFT explore in the work mirrors the symbiosis between the two Dutch artists who make up the studio, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta. ‘The transformative power of nature awakens an intuition that we all still have within us,’ they say. ‘In the relationship between nature and technology, we are highlighting a subtle and poetic balance between the two.

The dual aspect of Meadow stems from DRIFT’s own dual characters; Ralph Nauta, forever ensconced by technological innovation and Science Fiction-like themes and Lonneke Gordijn, an avid observer of nature and researcher of evolutionary transformations. Neither compete, but instead work as one. The work captures how two seemingly converse entities can come together and develop their own, unique relationship. In Meadow, this is reflected in the light, colour and opening and closing rhythms which, together, form new patterns.

The work is a highlight of a programme which encompasses digital experiences, the creation of new environments and large-scale works by a host of experimental artists. For Es Devlin, performative sculptures are brought to life in Forest of Us, which draws parallels between the structures within us which allow us to breathe, and those external to us. The bronchial tubes which exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide and the trees which exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen are explored in the work which begins as a film. Viewers are invited to step into this visual world through random permutations which lead to a mirror maze. The surreal hall of mirrors confuses our perceptions - distracted by our own image on an endless loop, we lose sight of our connection with the biosphere.

James Turrell, too, plays with our perceptions in Akhu. Continuing his exploration of optical illusions through light, volume and scale. Here, he uses the prism of light for a large-scale installation: viewers, welcomed into a room of monochrome lighting, are perturbed when the light then disperses. The abrupt change in perception leaves them disorientated, and with nothing to focus on.

For teamLab, the size of the Miami venue allows for a greater depth of experimentation. Between Life and Non-Life encompasses projects both new and recent from the interdisciplinary collective. Installations include the debut piece Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life, which places the visitor amongst giant floating clouds. Upon pushing through, the clouds break and, like a living thing, repair themselves until, like the body, a limit is reached and they ultimately collapse, permanently.

The installation joins other pieces including Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together – Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour and Proliferating Immense Life. A Whole Year per Year is a computer-generated continual cycle of flowers growing, blooming and dying, with flowers scattered on the floor withering when stepped on. Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries also immerses the visitor in the atmosphere, inviting them to influence the flow of water particles which part as they pass.

INFORMATION

superblue.com

Brit Awards 2021 winners will be announced on the night of 11 May at London’s O2 Arena, and will receive trophies by British designers Yinka Ilori and Es Devlin. This is the first double, collaborative trophy design in the awards’ history, a concept imagined to celebrate the act of giving during a difficult year.

The Brit trophy design by Devlin and Ilori follows a long tradition of UK creatives designing for the award, including artists Tracey Emin and Anish Kapoor and architects Zaha Hadid and RIBA Gold Medal 2021 winner David Adjaye.

The designers have created two distinct, visually striking statuettes for the Brit Awards: Ilori’s design features his signature graphic colour palette with bold compositions inspired by his Nigerian heritage, while Devlin’s smaller silver trophy is engraved with a maze pattern, the designer explains, ‘that celebrates the paths many of those working within the creative industries have had to tread in order to progress through this challenging year.’ Each winner is encouraged to give the smaller trophy to someone else: a family member, friend, neighbour, colleague, fellow artist, key worker, or another person important to them.

‘The idea came from the experience of lockdown, where your neighbour you’ve lived beside for six years and never say hello to, suddenly gave you flowers, foods, acts of kindness,’ explains Ilori. ‘I wanted to capture that...I would describe it as two artists from different disciplines, different inspirations, coming together to design a trophy based around the idea of giving something back – acts of kindness.’

Adds Devlin: ‘Yinka and I thought that the best award that one could receive would be agency to award another...Each recipient is invited to award the second trophy to someone they consider worthy - it might be recognition - or it might be someone that does something entirely unrelated to music.’

INFORMATION

esdevlin.com
yinkailori.com

Es Devlin's Forest For Change has popped up at Somerset House as part of London Design Biennale 2021 (on view until 27 June 2021), in partnership with Project Everyone. The initiative aims to showcase the facts behind the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (which include eradicating poverty, establishing gender equality, and fighting the climate crisis) and offer a glimpse into the ‘urgent pathway of action to a better and fairer future’.

When Devlin first visited Somerset House, something attracted her attention: ‘I discovered that the Enlightenment principles on which the building was conceived specifically forbade the introduction of trees into the courtyard,’ she recalls. So naturally, as soon as she was able to leave her mark on the historical London venue, the first thing she had in mind was to plant a forest in it. 

‘The first thing we wanted to do when considering this year’s biennale,’ says Devlin, ‘was to counter this attitude of human dominance over nature, by allowing a forest to overtake the entire courtyard. In literature, forests are often places of transformation: the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare, the enchanted forests of the Brothers Grimm.’ The installation was created in collaboration with landscape designer Philip Jaffa and urban greening specialist Scotscape, and features 400 trees, representing 23 species local to the UK and Northern Europe. The installation includes an immersive Bird Song Soundscape by Brian Eno, Cheryl Tipp and the British Library Board, and each tree will be replanted in the city after the exhibition is over.

The forest's impressive presence within the courtyard will serve as an interactive green landscape set to encourage debate around themes of climate change, inequality and post-pandemic recovery. ‘The UN Sustainable Development Goals offer us clear ways to engage and alter our behaviour,’ says Devlin. ‘It is our hope that an interaction with the goals in the forest will be transformative.’  

Devlin’s forest is part of the London Design Biennale’s rich programme of pavilions and events, including Ini Archibong’s Pavilion of the African Diaspora and ‘Design in an Age of Crisis’, an exhibition showcasing radical thinking, and the result of an open call to the design community at large. 

‘In our global, digital era, design can instantly permeate borders and bridge cultures,’ said Devlin on the occasion of the London Design Biennale opening on 1 June 2021. ‘As a community of designers approaching shared global challenges from culturally diverse viewpoints, the collective resonance of our ideas and our actions has the power to be truly transformative. I am delighted to be working alongside such an extraordinary group of designers, thinkers, artists and makers who have the power to influence and change minds in order to help build a more sustainable future.’

‘Great design ideas can help change things for the better, inspire people and give them hope for the future – never more needed than now,’ says London Design Biennale president Sir John Sorrell. ‘At Somerset House in June, the London Design Biennale will present inspired thinking from across the world in a unique exhibition designed to entertain, inform and spark action.’

Watch: a time-lapse of Es Devlin's Forest being built at Somerset house

INFORMATION

London Design Biennale is now on view at Somerset House, 1-27 June 2021. londondesignbiennale.com

ADDRESS

Somerset House Strand
London
WC2R 1LA

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With the pace of life as we know it very much slowed down these days, it’s both ironic and fortuitous that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual fashion exhibition staged by its Costume Institute is in fact focused on the temporal nature of fashion. Conceived to coincide with the museum’s 150th anniversary, and made possible by Louis Vuitton, ‘About Time: Fashion and Duration’ opens this week, six months after its intended date in May. Looking back on the last 150 years of clothes, from 1870 to present day, the show charts how sartorial associations across the years have transcended time to conflate the past, present and future.
 
‘Fashion is indelibly connected to time,’ says Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of The Costume Institute, ‘It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times, serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece. Through a series of chronologies, the exhibition uses the concept of duration to analyze the temporal twists and turns of fashion history.’

Inspired by philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘la durée’ – the continuity of time, the exhibition employs a series of flashbacks and fast-forwards to emphasise fashion’s ephemeral nature while disrupting the conventional and linear timeline of viewing history. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by the visual artist and stage designer Es Devlin, who fashioned a pair of adjacent galleries to resemble two enormous clock faces that each mark 60 minutes of fashion, the exhibition features the work of Cristobal Balenciaga, Rei Kawakubo, Charles James, Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood, Yohji Yamamoto, Shayne Oliver and Virgil Abloh, to name just a few.
 
‘Nicolas Ghesquiere and I have collaborated on almost all of his Louis Vuitton shows. Together we shape the models’ path in order to communicate the spirit and thesis of the collection,’ shares Devlin, who’s design had been finalised and construction underway pre-lockdown. ‘When Nicolas introduced me to Andrew to discuss the exhibition, Andrew and I combined our experience of turning ideas into physical journeys. Our aim is to communicate the phenomenon of time as it is expressed through the female form, emotionally as well as intellectually, through the expansion and contraction and shifting materialities of the space.’
 
‘Our design solution was derived from study of the mechanics of clocks – parallel linear calibrations run through the spaces, allowing the viewer to follow chronology and interruptions simultaneously,’ she continues. ‘Andrew identified folds and feedback loops in the linear history of the garments. He found formal resonances across the centuries: perhaps indicating parallel pressures and patterns of behaviour that may have been experienced by women living a century or more apart. His curation of these undulations invited a clear presentational device so the audience could simultaneously read a chronological narrative, while understanding the visual resonances of the temporal aberrations and interruptions.’

The passing of each minute on the clock highlights a different pair of garments, which are connected through shape, motif, material or pattern, such as a black silk faille princess-line dress from the 1870s and an Alexander McQueen ‘Bumster’ skirt from 1995. All the garments in the exhibition are black (truly a perennial fashion favourite) in order to underscore the changes in form, save for a sole white patchwork gown from Victor & Rolf’s Spring/Summer 2020 haute couture collection, which concludes the exhibition and symbolises the need for sustainability in order to ensure the future of fashion.

With 125 garments on view, mostly gleaned from the Costume Institute’s collection, the dramatic array succinctly documents the evolution of fashion, inviting viewers to consider the historical pressures of the world around at the time that lead to the rise of specific silhouettes.
 
‘This exhibition documents one and a half centuries of fashion and cultural history – expressed through the shifting architecture of the female form.’ Devlin says, ‘The title ‘About Time’ reads as an admonition and invitation to consider the circular design principles which will need to inform the fashion industry if the planet is to remain a habitat for humans. The exhibition concludes with a meditation on a single garment. The recycled fragments of fabric orbit the garment in projected cycles of creation and destruction and recreation.’

INFORMATION

metmuseum.org

‘It’s a meditative space, to me it feels something like a chapel,’ explains artist and designer Es Devlin of her newly unveiled commission at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery in London’s Ealing. ‘It’s conceived to console the viewer in a way: to remind us that humans have managed to shift our perspectives over the millennia and to encourage us that we can do so again.’ Memory Palace is the second exhibition at the Sir Joane Soane-designed country home, which reopened in spring following a major £12m restoration project.

The immersive, 18m-wide installation is a ‘subjective and personal’ mapping of 73 pivotal moments in mankind’s history, from the first known human drawing in South Africa’s Blombos Cave (73,000 BCE) through to the low-lying deltas of Bangladesh’s Bay of Bengal, where rising seas are being felt in 2019. Fragments of cities and building punctuate the stark space, Soane’s prolific passion for collecting and creating architectural models echoed in Devlin’s topographical modelling. (She has similarly transformed Soane’s library space at Pitzhanger into a reading room filled with books that informed her work.)

‘It started with a sketch: I had a sense of the broad sweep I wanted to cover, starting with the first intentional marks left by humans in caves, and ending with current ongoing shifts in our attitudes to the interlinking fields of ecology and economics,’ says Devlin. Conscious of the diverse and international make-up of her studio, Devlin and her team put their heads together to identify decisive historical events, also canvasing family and friends ‘to include a variety of generations’. We’re invited to remember the segregated bus in Alabama where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat (1955), or the languages that were outlawed in Machu Picchu during Spanish colonial rule (1781).

Eager to experiment with more sustainable materials, the artist worked with Diagon – the fabricator who also built her Mirror Maze – to research and source cross-laminated bamboo ply sheets. Some 650 individual 500mm square tiles of bamboo were CNC milled to form the main body of the work. This resulted in visible grain in the less contoured areas, with the detailing rendered in a lower resolution than that of the 3D-printed ‘special’ buildings. Fittingly, ‘like an image reproduced in memory, some areas are higher definition than others’, she says. The work is coated in a breathable, non-toxic Earthborn paint (the first UK interior paint to receive an EU Ecolabel).

In spite of the serene setting, there’s a certain anxiety embedded in the fringes of her atlas, where ‘the most profound and urgent shift in thinking is located’, she notes, referring to the present climate crisis. But Devlin doesn’t necessarily require us to subscribe to her narrative: she’s provided a blank version of the map, which visitors are invited to take from the exhibition ‘to create their own cartography’. Still, Memory Palace is a sanctum for reflection, quite literally, as the work is multiplied by mirrored planes. ‘Chapels don’t normally have mirrors though,’ says Devlin. ‘The viewer finds themselves within the work – for better and for worse.’ 

INFORMATION

Memory Palace, until 12 January 2020, Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery. pitzhanger.org.uk; esdevlin.com

ADDRESS

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery
Mattock Lane
Ealing
London W5 5EQ

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Set designer Es Devlin is collaborating with Google Arts & Culture and The Space on a unique London Design Festival project that sees history, digital design and public art merge in Trafalgar Square.

Winner of the Panerai London Design Medal at the British Land Celebration of Design Awards last year, Devlin impressed audiences then with an alluring V&A Museum mixed-media installation that recreated her lakeside stage set for the Bregenz Festival’s production of Carmen. This year, the Peckham-based designer heads outside for her London Design Festival pursuit with an interactive experience.

A newly formed lion appears in Trafalgar Square, glowing in fluorescent red light it stands out much more than the other four stone sculptures that were cast in 1867 at the base of Nelson’s Column. Devlin’s lion is no silent statue but instead roars with words that the public can ‘feed’ it, alluding to the sculpture’s title Please Feed The Lions.

It was during a walk around Trafalgar Square with Sir John Sorrell that prompted the idea; she recalls him musing to her about the historic statues, ‘Landseer never wanted those lions to look so passive: he proposed a much more animated stance, but Queen Victoria found it too shocking.’ This led Devlin to ask the question, ‘what if we could invest the lion with a diversely crowd-sourced collective poetic voice?’

During the day the messages are projected on an LED display in the lion's mouth, while at night, Nelson’s Column proudly displays these words. Over the past year, Devlin has worked with Google’s Machine Learning to bring this experience to life, and with the help of commissioning and development agency The Space, Please Feed The Lions will be broadcast online across the globe.

‘We’re delighted to be able to support Es’s exploration of Machine Learning in her work and be part of her public artwork for London Design Festival,’ says Freya Murray, programme manager for Google Arts & Culture. ‘Machine Learning is helping to tackle some of the biggest challenges we face today, from healthcare to environmental conservation. This technology can also provide artists with a new set of tools. It’s exciting to see Es Devlin collaborating with this to realise her vision for her first large-scale sculptural work.’

Read our Es Devlin profile here

INFORMATION

Please Feed The Lions will be on view 18-23 September during London Design Festival. For more information visit the website

ADDRESS

Trafalgar Square
London
WC2N 5DN

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Anish Kapoor may command multi-million figures at the auction houses but one lucky individual will walk away with a unique artwork by the Turner Prize winner for just £50 this month – and it’s all for a good cause. The latest edition of Secret 7” in London sees a top billing of creative forces – from artists, to illustrators, graphic designers, musicians and filmmakers – create one-off record sleeves that will be sold at the close of exhibition on 24 June, with profits going to mental health charity Mind.

The concept is simple enough: Secret 7” chooses an iconic track from seven artists and presses each one 100 times to 7” vinyl. Contributors create a unique artwork for the track of their choice, with all 700 records exhibited at The Jetty at Greenwich Peninsula. The twist? Buyers won’t know the identity of their sleeve designer until after they’ve purchased their record.

Founded by Kevin King and Jordan Stokes, Secret 7” has raised over £175,000 for charity since it was established in 2012. Previous contributors include Yoko Ono, Ai Weiwei, Gilbert & George, David Shrigley, Julian Opie, and Jenny Holzer. The 2018 roster includes another Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller; fashion designer Paul Smith; artists Jake and Dinos Chapman; The Clash bassist Paul Simonon; and set designer Es Devlin.

As for this year’s tracks? It’s a heady set list: I’m Not Down, by The Clash; I Saved The World Today, by Eurythmics; Lover, You Should’ve Come Over, by Jeff Buckley; Castles Made of Sand, by Jimi Hendrix; Help, by London Grammar; No Surface All Feeling, by Manic Street Preachers; and Damaged, by Primal Scream.

The Secret 7” exhibition coincides with a number of happenings in and around Greenwich Peninsula, including a show by illustrator and ‘doodle bomber’ Hattie Stewart (until 25 June), and the Greenwich and Dockands International Festival (22 June – 7 July). ’We want Greenwich Peninsula to be a test-bed for creative ideas, giving emerging  artists and curators freedom to contribute to an ongoing discourse on London’s eclectic cultural scene,’ says Kaia Charles, Greenwich Peninsula cultural projects manager.

We caught up with Secret 7” co-founder Kevin King to find out more...

How did you choose the tracks for this year’s edition?
As with previous years we wanted the line-up to be a mix of styles and time periods – it lends itself to creating a visually diverse show. This year we are working with Sony Music for the first time and challenged ourselves to make the tracks both relatable to our cause, Mind, and ones that haven’t been on a 7” record before.
 
Who can contribute artwork to Secret 7”?
Roughly half the show is made up of people we invite from a range of disciplines. The other half come through an open submission – we had 6,000 artworks sent to us in eight weeks. Jordan (Secret 7” co-founder) and I make all the selections. He lives in Sydney, so we both do it in isolation and then combine our picks, and then refine further.

What’s the strangest submission you’ve received?
Wigs. This year we’ve got our second wiggy sleeve sent to us. We’ve also got a sandcastle, a balloon and a whole range of totally one-off record sleeves. Every year more and more people are taking up the challenge to create their design direct to a blank sleeve rather than a digital submission.

The billing for this year includes some heavyweights – have you ever had to turn down a submission from one?
We’ve never had to turn a big name down before due to numbers, but we have had to decline artwork from one in a previous year as they had included the track title on their work. The rules are rules, for all to follow.
 
You must have some dream contributors and tracks in mind for future editions...
Martin Creed, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Grayson Perry, Jenny Saville, Jesse Kanda, Anthea Hamilton, Lubaina Himid, Michel Gondry… there are plenty to keep up driving on for a few more shows. There are so many dream tracks. We tried and failed for something from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill this year, maybe next time around.
 
Tell us about what visitors can expect on sale day.
A queue. A small bunch of hardcore folks will go overnight, though the majority will arrive early hours on the day itself. We reveal all our secrets that day and any that remain typically get auctioned via the charity's eBay page, which gives those who can't be in London on the day a chance to own our records.

INFORMATION

The 2018 edition of Secret 7” is on view until 24 June. For more information, visit the Secret 7” website and the Greenwich Peninsula website

ADDRESS

The Jetty at Greenwich Peninsula
London SE10 0JF

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To step inside the world of Es Devlin, the world’s most sought-after set designer, is to take a trip down the proverbial rabbit hole and into Wonderland. Her perennially curious mind questions everything, leading her to create unique concepts. ‘Machiko, can you look up the etymology of “indulgent”?’ she calls out to one of her design team during our visit to her south London studio space. ‘Sometimes the origins of words don’t get you very far, but more often they do.’

This instinctive curiosity, along with her seemingly boundless energy and imagination, has fired Devlin’s supercharged career. She filled the stadium at London’s 2012 Olympic closing ceremony with Damien Hirst’s 5,600 sq m Union Jack spin painting; sent Miley Cyrus down a tongue-shaped slide; mounted Jay Z and Kanye West onto two video cubes; and conjured a rotating cinema for Beyoncé. What she practises, she says, is the ‘suspension of disbelief’, and she is most comfortable when operating ‘on the edge of impossible’.

In her Peckham HQ, concept models fill every surface, while miniature props spill out of drawers and cabinets. On shelves, bulging folders with labels such as ‘Adele’ or ‘U2’ hint at Devlin’s jaw-dropping client list. ‘I’ve got to talk to you about the word “client”,’ she says apologetically. ‘I don’t really like it. It’s derived from the Latin clinare, meaning “to incline or bend”. Theatre is a collaboration, a set of ideas being constructed by people in space. So there are no clients, as such.’

Nearby, Devlin’s small team of five or so young designers busily click around screens building complex digital models for various projects – the next Louis Vuitton show, a mirror maze for New York and a top-secret hotel installation are all underway.

The daughter of a journalist and a teacher, Devlin grew up in the East Sussex town of Rye, a place that continues to inspire her. ‘When I was younger I made stuff for people,’ she says, pondering the origins of her creativity. ‘I’d start making a Christmas present for somebody in November and get it ready by Easter. There was often someone else involved when I was making stuff.’

Unsure of where to channel her talents, Devlin embarked on an art foundation course at Central Saint Martins, where a tutor suggested she complete the Motley Theatre Design Course. ‘At the beginning, I didn’t understand what a set designer did, to be honest,’ she reflects. ‘I walked into the room, which was not so different to this one,’ she says, glancing around her studio, ‘except it had mice and smelt of Pot Noodles. I thought: “OK, I like this room, this is a bit like where I’ve been all my life so far, playing with bits of cardboard. And if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just be happy to be here making stuff.”’

Luckily for Devlin it did work out. Upon her graduation in 1995 she won the Linbury Prize for Stage Design and with it, her first professional commission: Edward II at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton.

Over the past 20 years, Devlin has gone from small theatres to gigantic stadiums, but it’s only in the past 12 months that she has found herself creating standalone works. In 2016, her scent-infused Mirror Maze installation with Chanel delighted crowds in Peckham, while her PoemPortraits series with Google at the Serpentine Gallery saw a crowdsourced poem projected across visitors’ faces. ‘After 20 years of working in performance spaces, where there are certain invisible parameters, doing this allows me to escape those restrictions,’ she reflects.

This independent new direction coincides with another professional triumph for Devlin, the Panerai London Design Medal. Part of the British Land Celebration of Design Awards, the medal is distributed each year during the London Design Festival and previous recipients have included Zaha Hadid and Ron Arad. ‘I have been following the London Design Festival and the medal for the past decade,’ says Devlin, who also holds an OBE and honorary doctorate from Central Saint Martins. ‘It’s a festival that is infused with a spirit of inclusivity. It epitomises everything that London represents to so many, and that has shaped my character and my practice. “Design” stems from the Latin designare – “to plan, mark out or designate”. I design in London; but it was London that designed me.

‘My work is transitory and exists only as this skeletal trace through the memories of those who were there at each performance. Sometimes the work feels invisible once it’s passed. Sometimes I feel that it exists as a complete body of work only in my memory, so to have it recognised and made visible in the design community is overwhelming.’

As part of the celebrations, a 1:10 recreation of Devlin’s spectacular lakeside stage set for the Bregenz Festival’s production of Carmen will be on show within London’s V&A Museum, as will a showcase of all four British Land Celebration of Design Award winners, with exhibition design by Devlin. ‘I need to encapsulate 20 years of work in one piece,’ she says, looking again around her studio. ‘I haven’t quite nailed it yet.’

Having found herself in a moment of reflection, Devlin tells us that she has also been pondering a book and possibly a retrospective exhibition. ‘I need to create some kind of thesis of my 20 years of work,’ she reveals, eyes twinkling with excitement as her imagination sets alight. ‘I’d love to create an installation where you could travel through my stage sets. You could walk in through Kanye’s mountain, and then out through Wagner’s Parsifal tunnel and then slide down Miley’s tongue. Wouldn’t it be fun?’ We’re waiting on the edge of our seats.

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

INFORMATION

‘British Land Celebration of Design Medal’ is on view until 24 September and ‘Hide Tide for Carmen’ is on view until 5 November, both at the V&A. For more information, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website and Es Devlin’s website

ADDRESS

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

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