An Atlas of Es Devlin

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Since beginning in small theaters in 1995, she has charted a course from kinetic stage designs at the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera to installations at major institutions, including the World Expo, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations headquarters.

In this curator-guided tour of An Atlas of Es Devlin, visitors will examine the origins, rigor, and depth of Devlin’s process through a compelling journey into her 30-year archive, charting teenage drawings and paintings, to designs for theater, opera, stadium concerts, and ceremonies, to her current engagement with climate and civilizational crises. Over the past decade her art practice has engaged with biodiversity, linguistic diversity, and collective AI-generated poetry. Assistance dogs are welcome at Aviva Studios, and we can provide mats and water bowls on request, just ask a host when you arrive. She has been awarded The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol, Kent and the University of the Arts London as well as Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts and CBE. Having studied English Literature and Fine Art at Bristol University and London’s Central Saint Martins, respectively, Devlin admits that her hunger for visual ingenuity and flair for the poetic almost led her into the headline-grabbing world of 1990s contemporary art.As visitors enter the galleries, they will be invited into a replica of Devlin’s London studio to sit at her desk surrounded by tools, materials and works in progress. 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. 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.

At the UN headquarters in New York last month, I was sitting not far from the Sudanese-American poet Emi Mahmoud when she got up to perform her work and brought a room of 200 people to tears, to their feet, to their senses. Opening up the mesmerising set of Free Your Mind for exploration , the installation is free to attend and open to all. Her expansive mirrored “Forest of Us” invites viewers to inhabit the visual symmetry between the bronchial structures that allow people to breathe and the branching tree geometries that make breathing possible. Reflecting on a three-decade career with a client list that reads like the guestlist of the Grammys, even Es Devlin can’t resist the urge to flirt with what could have been. It was a workout for the imagination – a lesson in shifting scale and perspective and perceiving through the eyes of others – and a brilliant way to help us understand the many facets of the complex systems we inhabit.The final gallery is filled with the texts that have guided Devlin’s work—from the plays, song lyrics and opera libretti that have informed her performance sculptures to the works of fiction, poetry, geo-philosophy, anthropological economics, biology and climate science at the root of her art practice over the past decade.