Es Devlin: Other Worlds — The Design Museum Retrospective
In 1926, Natalia Goncharova designed the vast painted backcloth for the Ballets Russes production of The Firebird, moving between painting, theatre and performance with the same disregard for disciplinary boundaries that characterises Es Devlin's work a century later. Devlin encountered the idea of “everythingism” through a commission for V&A East Storehouse responding to Goncharova's Firebird backcloth, and found in it an apt description of her own way of working.
Es Devlin: Other Worlds, opening at the Design Museum on 2 October, traces three decades of her multidisciplinary practice through her archive of drawings, models, photographs, sketches and other working material.
Devlin points out that working across disciplines was once far less unusual. Robert Hooke worked with Christopher Wren on St Paul's Cathedral while also drawing fleas through a microscope and the cosmos through a telescope. Specialism, she says, is a recent habit. Her own career has followed a similarly expansive route, from theatre and opera to concert stages, fashion, Olympic ceremonies and stadium spectacle, before installation and public art became the dominant part of her practice.
The distinctions between different kinds of maker have become less relevant as the technology around making has changed. Devlin points out we are now starting to distinguish between works made by human hand and works made by AI. She expects that distinction to become more important than the categories traditionally used to separate one creative discipline from another: she foresees “less and less emphasis on different ways that humans make things and more emphasis on the fact that a human hand and embodied consciousness made it.”
For Devlin, the hand is not simply the instrument through which an idea is executed. “Thinking happens at the tips of your fingers,” she says.The archive at the Design Museum makes that process visible. Around 5,000 objects have been brought together, from early sketches, paintings, collages and diaries to photographs and maquettes.
Looking through it now, Devlin notices forms that recur across the decades: a line, a revolving cube, a circle. They predate her and, she says, will continue after her. The archive records not only what she has made, but the drawings, objects and fragments that have accumulated around the practice as it has developed.
As the scale and setting of Devlin's work changed, so did her relationship with the audience. Theatre gave her the performer and spectator; concert work introduced the energy of thousands of people experiencing something simultaneously; fashion brought her into spaces where visitors could move through an environment rather than simply watch a show. Public art removed the conventional stage altogether.
In 2016, Mirror Maze began placing visitors inside the work rather than in front of it. Two years later, Please Feed the Lions brought that approach into Trafalgar Square, where poetry generated from words submitted by the public was projected onto a monumental lion. The subsequent installations — from Forest of Us in Miami to Come Home Again at Tate Modern — have continued to enlarge that relationship between object, place and visitor. Devlin now describes museums and art installations as the main focus of her practice, but says she brings to them the terms of engagement she learned in performance.
That is particularly evident in the scenography of Other Worlds. Visitors first experience the exhibition together, in a group of around 40, sitting quietly and receiving the same opening experience at the same time. Those first minutes establish what Devlin calls a temporary community, which then becomes “the lens through which you see the rest”.
Devlin describes the audience as a “temporary society,” where people are brought together around a focal point, creating a small society that exists for the duration of an experience before everyone disperses.
Devlin's collaborations with musicians have also shaped the way she thinks about audiences and authorship. She prefers to work directly with performers, beginning with the mutable material of a song or lyric, treating the lyrics almost as a script and then finding the point where her own line of inquiry overlaps with the artist's world. The result is a negotiation between two practices.
Her archive makes clear how much her work responds to its time, even when she did not recognise that at the moment. She remembers working on Hecuba in 2005 while several theatre companies were producing the same play in the aftermath of the Gulf War. So often, she says, what she was making was a response to the social and political conditions of the moment, though she didn't notice at the time. She is, she says, very much a product of her time.
That awareness now sits alongside a concern with the ecological and technological conditions of the present. Come Home Again, first shown outside Tate Modern in 2022, reappears at the Design Museum in a new constellation of illuminated cut-outs representing endangered moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish and fungi.
For an artist whose work has occupied opera houses, stadiums, fashion shows, museums and city squares, the retrospective brings the scale back down to the desk: paper, pencil, models, books, fragments and the recurring forms that have followed her through three decades.
Es Devlin: Other Worlds runs at the Design Museum from 2 October 2026 to 4 April 2027.
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