ES DEVLIN (DESIGN)

“I’ve found that power really enjoys having truth spoken” -Es Devlin

The ideas world

where does all of this come from?

Devling being Devlin

Some of her personality

CONTENTS CONTENTS

Childhood

the impact her childhood had with her nowdays

Workin

on influence

The way her name became influential

her daily to go!

LIFE AS ES...

the 48-year-old British set designer, is often asked where her ideas come from. These ideas – “stage sculptures”, she calls them – might take the form of the inge nious revolving glass box that encloses the performers in director

Sam Mendes’s pro duction of The Lehman Trilogy, transferring to Broadway next year after a sold-out run in Lon don’s West End, or an outsize replica of Miley Cyrus’s tongue that the singer slid down on her 2014 Bangerz tour.

Or it could be 200,000 pieces of mirror fixed by hand on to columns for a Louis Vuitton runway show or a pair of hands 25m high emerging from Lake Constance in Austria, tossing pla ying cards in the air for a production of Bizet’s Carmen.

https://www.autograph.co.uk/come-home-again-es-devlin-and-autograph-at-the-tate-modern/

THE IDEAS WORLD

So, yes, ideas, ridiculous ones, lots of them. At first, Devlin tried to answer these inquiries honestly. Most of her ideas, she would reply, come just after she has woken up. She loves that moment when she’s lying in bed, in a totally dark room, maybe jetlagged, and the only light is the faint edge round the curtains. There’s something very stage-like about it. She sets an initial alarm – “a very gentle one” – then a proper one, to allow for 20 minutes of meditative dozing. “It’s a lovely liminal space,” she says. “You can really luxuriate in what your mind would be like if you didn’t have to do anything. It’s really important.”

The problem is that people really hate this answer. “They almost want the, you know, map coordinates,” she goes on, laughing. “‘Where are the ideas? Come on! Don’t fob me off with some bullshit about sleeping.’”

her first large scale maze work , mirrormaze (peckham, london 2016), explored perforated cinema and memory and identity through reflective labyrinthine geometries. her immense mirrored maze forest of us (2021) exami nes the striking visual symmetries between the structu res within us that allow us to breathe and the structures around us that make breathing possible. alongside work by james turrell, it forms part of the inaugural exhibition at the new superblue arts centre in miami.

in devlin’s work, the viewer becomes a participant. she developed her deep understanding of the terms of audience engagement through two decades of co llaborations in theatre - designing the lehman trilogy, national theatre london, nyc, la); hamlet with benedict cumberbatch at the barbican, a number, girls and boys, the nether (royal court), chimerica , the hunt(almeida), faith healer (donmar), operas including don giovanni, salome, les troyens and mahagonny at the royal opera house, carmen on the lake at bregenz, austria, olympic ceremonies (london and rio), super bowl halftime shows (dr dre, kendrick lamar et al 2022 and the weeknd 2021) and has created some of the most renowned stage sculptures (with beyoncé, the weeknd, kanye west, u2, jay z, florence and the machine, imogen heap, petshop boys, miley cyrus and billie eilish) seen by mass au diences in stadia and arena around the world.

while the audience watch the stage, devlin observes the audience. her observations have led to experiments in collective ai-assisted poetry. the collective poem portrait which started at the serpentine gallery in 2016 continues to be co-authored by the public and the al gorithm online today. in 2017 the singing tree, a collec tive choral installation at the v&a, london merged ma chine-learning with sound and light and her fluorescent red fifth lion roared ai-generated collective poetry to crowds in london’s trafalgar square in september 2018.

DEVLINDEVLIN BEING

Devlin – who is petite but strong-looking and today, as she often is, dressed head-to-toe in black, an exact match for her hair, which is knotted in a bun – thinks her job as a set desig ner in the theatre is to find “little chinks in the armour of the brain”. When she gets it right, complex ideas and even archaic language suddenly make perfect sense to an audien ce. “You get these tiny opportunities where people relax enough to feel that everything is familiar and they can follow the story,” she says. “We all know that feeling when we go to the theatre and we’re either relaxed knowing we’re in good hands, or anxious because we’re in crap hands and it’s going to be a shit night.”

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Devlin being Devlin, she has come up with another, more evocative answer. “I picked a space, which is a corridor,” she explains, as we sit in the gar den of her house in Dulwich, south London. Devlin recalls that she spent a lot of her childhood in corridors. First of all, she has “a really big mouth”, which meant she was always being kicked out of class. Second, she’s very smiley, and this infuriated her tea chers even more: “They’d go, ‘Esmerelda, wipe that grin off your face!’” Now, looking back, Devlin realises that corridors can be magical places. She might hear snatches of a phy sics class in one room, some poetry from another, a music lesson taking place down the hall, teachers having a gossip. “But I’m the only person who’s listening to all of that together,” she exclaims. Then she stops: “The next thing is just not for getting it.”

all of th toughts you have, show them

WORKING ON INFLUENCE

Over 25 years, Devlin has established herself as the world’s most influential set designer. She began in theatre – via a degree in English lite rature from Bristol University and a foundation course at Central Saint Martins – and it’s here that her impact has been especially profound. When she started out, theatre felt like a dying art form: predictable, staid, classic texts played for audiences in their dotage. Today it feels vi brant: a place where you switch off your phone (a radical idea), sit with other people (even more challenging) and experience entertainment that, when it’s finished, will exist only in the memo ries of the people who were there. Some of De vlin’s most notable stage sets include Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet at the Barbican in 2015, a witty, clinical take on American Psycho at the Almeida and the National Theatre’s 1998 revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. (On opening night, Pinter was doing a meet-and-greet and said, “Have you met Es Devlin? She wrote the play.”

WORK WITH

When we talk about Es, she always had dedi cated 100% to her proyects, to the people she representates all over the world; an example of how dedicated she is we can see it in this storytelying: We meet in the afternoon, at 4pm, and Devlin’s already been to Paris, had a meeting with Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director at Louis Vuitton, and come back. Now, she talks for more than two hours without remotely flagging. The re’s a story that, while she was in labour with her second child, she was simultaneously sending plans to the singer Shakira – I ask her if I’ve heard it right, though I suspect I know the answer. “That’s sadly true,” she replies. “Felix Barrett [founder of the theatre company Punchdrunk] was working on that with me. And, yeah, he came down to King’s hospital to chat about Shakira in between contractions.” Devlin insists she has slowed down now: partly because of her children (she has two, a daughter Ry and son Ludo, with her husband Jack Galloway, a costume designer), and partly because of where we’re sitting. The family bought their house in 2016 and Devlin says she is especially besotted with the gvarden: it has a woodland feel with plants flowering over the spring and summer like “a slow-motion fireworks dis play”. The only indication that we’re not deep in the coun try are the gentle pock-pock of tennis balls from the club next door and a beep-beep-beep of train doors opening at a nearby station. Devlin says that when a new project comes in, she decides to take it based on whether it excites her enough to leave her children and her garden behind.

we’re sitting. The family bought their house in 2016 and Devlin says she is especially beso tted with the garden: it has a woodland feel with plants flowe ring over the spring and summer like “a slow-motion fireworks display”. The only in dication that we’re not deep in the country are the gentle pock-pock of tennis balls from the club next door and a beep-beep-beep of train doors opening at a nearby station. Devlin says that when a new project comes in, she decides to take it based on whether it excites her enough to leave her children and her garden behind.

WITH PASSION

Childhood impact

Some background might be helpful here. When she was six, Devlin’s parents moved the family from Surbiton in west London to Rye on the south coast. “They went for a romantic weekend on the advice of my Auntie Pru and they bought a hou se, which was a really dumb thing to do because they hadn’t sold their other house,” Devlin says. “But anyway.” One of the landmarks of the town was a handmade, 1:100 scale model of Rye in Victorian times, complete with sound and light effects. The Story of Rye was made by a local couple – a reti red teacher and an electrical engineer – and had a voiceover, Devlin recalls, recounting pertinent historical facts in “this terribly cheesy actor-y voice”.

“KIDS ARE THE MAIN REASON WHY THE IMAGINATION FLOWS

Es devlinDesign studio

Devlin’s design studio is based on the ground floor of her house in two soundproo fed rooms. She usually has between eight and 10 employees, mainly women, including teachers from the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Royal Co llege of Art, dotted between props and prototypes from previous projects. The studio is currently home to around 15 projects at different stages of development. Top of the list when we meet in July is the Pitzhanger commission, which has just opened. “They said to me, ‘Do whatever you want,’” she recalls. This, it turns out, is a dangerous thing to say to Devlin. She came back and said that she wanted to fill the gallery with a sprawling map. “But it’s not a map of the world in any recognisable way,” she clarifies. “It’s a map that charts, in my subjective opinion, each

Designer

Es Devlin has brought 197 trees with her to Glasgow’s COP26 conference. The small forest will be the setting for the New York Times Climate Hub, which is set to host a series of keyno te talks from the likes of Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai and Ban Kimoon while heads of state debate climate action elsewhere in the city.

The 197 living trees each represent a country. After COP26 ends, the trees –which are all local varie ties – will be replanted in Glasgow.

This isn’t the first time Devlin has made an environmental point with trees. Earlier this year she planted a 400-tree forest in the courtyard of London’s Somerset House as part of the London Design Biennale. She says Glasgow’s Conference of the Trees won’t be her last foray into forest-building either, explaining there are plans for a simi lar project in the US. For Devlin the mark trees leave behind can be a powerful state ment when visualised and experienced. “As a maker of things, I’m always concerned that in the interest of raising awareness I am myself going to leave a large carbon footprint,” she says.

Devlin explains that while it is a considerable effort to source, transport and plant the trees, the carbon emitted while the installation is developed will be sequestered over the lifespan of the trees. Additionally, she says the projects have been an excellent way to meet new people working in sectors that don’t usually cross paths with design.

“Gardening and landscaping are not in my background at all,” she explains, adding that she has worked with Philip Jaffa, founder and director of “forest architecture” prac tice Scape Design Associates for these two projects. “When you forge these relations

forms

COP26: La Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Cambio Climático de 2021 fue la 26.ª confe rencia de las partes de la Convención Marco de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Cambio Climático, y se celebró entre el 31 de oc tubre y el 12 de noviembre en la ciudad de Glasgow, Escocia. Wikipedia

The indoor forest

the setting for The New York Times Climate Hub

five echoes

in honor to channel N° 5 in its 100 years of launch

one of the largest works that have been produced in honor of channel