Es Devlin at the Design Museum: A fitting spectacle
Es Devlin: Other Worlds | Design Museum | ★★★★★
As one of City AM’s theatre critics, I’ve long been blown away by the work of Es Devlin, perhaps the most famous set designer in the land (although Bunny Christie might have something to say about that). She’s one of those artists whose work you can immediately recognise: she’s drawn again and again to familiar shapes and arrangements: beams of light, rotating cubes, concentric circles.
Even those with only a cursory knowledge of London theatre might recognise her set design from plays including The Lehman Trilogy (rotating cube), The Hunt (beams of light, cube) and The Crucible (a cube – made of water!).
But this fabulous exhibition at the Design Museum shows the breadth of her talent, collecting pieces from some 30 years of work and presenting them in a way that feels absolutely fitting for someone with such a strong theatrical background.
In a gambit I haven’t seen before in an exhibition like this, entry is staggered. Small groups gather in a waiting room before entering a recreation of Devlin’s London studio, filled with sketches and architectural sculptures and scribbled notes. After a few minutes, a video introducing the exhibition is beamed onto one of the walls, with Devlin breathily performing the voiceover. This is a show about, she says, “Imagining worlds that don’t yet exist”. We can imagine anything, she says – we can even imagine this wall is a door… And, as if by magic, the wall of the studio opens into the exhibition proper.
Entering Es Devlin’s world
Here you find three decades worth of work – everything from initial sketches for installations to watercolour paintings and scrap-books. Like her stage work, you can see themes repeating and evolving: concentric shapes draw you inside, partly inspired by the necessity when designing a stage to create the illusion of space that isn’t really there. Clear cubes reflect the hermetically-sealed lives of characters in a play.
What shouldn’t be surprising but is surprising nonetheless is the range of Devlin’s talents: she’s not only a set designer but a brilliant painter and draftswoman, drawing animals, nudes and cityscapes.
Devlin is keen to stress she is the product of her influences and her times and her environment; the last room features a very Devlin-esque vast, triangular bookshelf filled with 2,000 books, mounted on a huge rotating mirror, onto which are beamed quotes from Socrates, Dante, Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh. You’re invited to sit and read some of her inspirations, to enter her personal world – and it’s a lovely place to visit.
• Es Devlin at the Design Museum is on until 4 April 2027; Tap here for tickets