What do Adele, the Olympic Games and National Theatre have in common? Monumental set designs by one of Britain's best multidisciplinary artists
ES Delvin's designs encompass shows at the Royal Opera House, concerts by Jay Z and Kayne West and work for CHANEL.
ES Devlin creates temporary societies. A multi-talented artist, she develops environments for theatre, opera, rock concerts and dance, as well as immersive installations, performances and artworks, where the audience, through the combined magic of sound, light, movement and text, briefly becomes a community, sharing attention rather than passively viewing.
She is an ‘Everythingist’, someone who encompasses the vastness of human knowledge, combining diverse skills, passions and possibilities. The term was originally coined for Natalia Goncharova — another multi-talented woman, who painted, wrote, made illustrations and designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes — and is also the name of the installation that Devlin devised in response to Goncharova’s Firebird backcloth at V&A East.
Devlin cannot be pigeonholed as merely a set designer, although her creations cover a roll call of events — from operas such as Philip Glass’s Orphée at the Royal Opera House (2005), to plays such as The Lehman Trilogy (2018) and dance Connectome for the Royal Ballet (2014). She’s also worked on immersive structural environments for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne arena tour (2011), fashion installations for the 100th anniversary of Chanel No. 5 (2021) and the transformation of public and commercial spaces, including the closing and opening ceremonies of the Olympics in London (2012) and Rio (2016), respectively.
Devlin has worked on set pieces for Kanye West and Jay-Z as well as opera and ballet.
The wide-ranging nature of her practice — which is also evident in the variety of accolades she has received, from a Tony and multiple Oliviers to The Critics’ Circle Award for Contribution to the Arts (as well as an OBE and CBE) — is partly rooted in what she calls her ‘feral’ childhood.
She was born in 1971, the second of four children, to educationalist parents. ‘We weren’t allowed to watch much television; our constant refrain was: “We’re bored.” Mum used to say: “Only boring people are bored, here’s a Rice Krispie packet and a pair of scissors, go and make something.”
'We were endlessly cutting up yoghurt pots and cardboard boxes. We would make games and toy theatres, performing plays in them. We had a small space under the stairs, which was dark, where we could control the light, where we would experiment with our little projector.’ It was the precursor to her sophisticated use of light today.
A gifted musician, she played three instruments: each Saturday, from the age of 11, she took the train — unaccompanied — from Rye in East Sussex to the Royal Academy of Music, tacking on visits to galleries and jumble sales.
Intending to do printmaking and photography at Central St Martins, she was introduced to set design at the Motley Theatre Group. ‘I knew nothing about set design, but there was a dark red room full of people making model theatres, listening to opera, reading books, covered with reference images on the wall, in dialogue with each other.’
Fireworks exploding over the stadium during the Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Enticingly, there was 24-hour access to the studio. ‘I knew that I had so much work to do that I thought: “Well, even if this theatre thing is of no use, I’ll have this studio and I’ll just stay up all night making the stuff I want to make.”’ It was, in fact, of ‘use’. In 1995, she won the Linbury Prize and designed Marlowe’s Edward II for the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, Greater Manchester, and, in 1998, was invited to design the first ballet to be performed by the Rambert dance company at the newly refurbished Sadler’s Wells, followed closely by Pinter’s Betrayal for Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre.
Her career continued with increasingly spectacular projects worldwide. For any of her projects, Devlin watches rehearsals intensively and, during the ones for Wagner’s six-hour long Parsifal (2012), having to read the translations in subtitles, she became aware that she was doing more concentrated, uninterrupted reading in those 10 days than she had done for some time. ‘That was a source of interest to me, and also slight grief; it reminded me that I used to be much more absorbed in reading than I am now — I wondered whether a lot of people felt like me.’
Her response was to develop a collective reading event with Hannah Barry for Bold Tendencies (2018), in which Benedict Cumberbatch with 2,000 participants read The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.
Her most recent projects are also related to books and libraries, perhaps harking back to the days when she read English at Bristol and fell in love with the etymology of words. Both from last year are The Library of Light at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy — a 59ft-diameter revolving cylinder of 3,200 books — and The Library of Us, a triangular 20ft-tall, illuminated rotation of 2,500 books with a circular reflective pool in Miami, Florida, US.
Following on from those two, Devlin has just made her first indoor library, The Library of the Four Winds, a sculpture of hundreds of books inside Sir John Vanbrugh’s temple of the same name at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the architect’s death.
The Library of the Four Winds, at Castle Howard in York.
‘He has many parallels for me. The fascination he had with literature, with architecture, with geometry, with systems — he cared about systems, systems in power, systems in architecture, so there’s so much for me to respond to. I’ve made a revolving (illuminated) library.
'Everything I do is personal to me, as well as responding to situation and report, and it’s a library of all the books that made me who I am.’ She reads out selected passages and the books encircling the Temple, as well as those in the library, are her own, complete with her copious underlinings: ‘2026 is the National Year of Reading so we really hope this is going to encourage people to come to sit, to meet each other through text, and we’ll be doing some drawing classes, too.’
With such an all-encompassing career, her brain never seems inactive. ‘I draw to translate something that’s inside me to the outside. Drawing is me thinking and that’s how I figure stuff out. There are neurons in the end of my fingers, and [with] the friction, the meeting of the pencil to the paper with my hand and my eye, thoughts will happen in that process, which if I just lie in bed thinking about it, imagining, won’t be the same.
'You have to make the mark. The idea will take a different form if I pick up a pen or a piece of charcoal or a pencil.’ Her drawings are often in response to an invitation. However, projects commence with a feeling, based on a hinterland of past sensa-tions, experiences and responses.
'With the artworks, I’m often building on a line of enquiry,’ says Devlin.
‘How do I feel? What’s the experience? The process starts by going to a place. Having recorded experience, bodily apprehension of situation, the next is association: “What do I want to bring to bear here, of my batch of poems, of all the things that I’ve picked up along the way…”
'They’re visual and tactile, but they’re also mental, bringing in, always, a lot of reading and philosophical discussion. I use a lot of my instinct (that) is often to quite simple forms.’
Yet, her projects are always collaborative. She is not a fan of the ‘artist as genius’ approach. She collaborates with many different people, directors, gallerists, technical experts and skilled artisans — not least as the artistic director of Homo Faber 2026’s ‘Island Of Light’ in Venice, Italy, a festival of craftsmanship comprising 15 installations and 500 makers — as well as audiences.
This collaboration is not episodic, it’s a continuous chain of influences and shared thinking. ‘We always say that each project we come to, we come through the lens of the thing we just did and the people we just worked with, so we’re always… one step removed from a conversation we just had with someone else. With the artworks, I’m often building on a line of enquiry.’
She has an ongoing project ‘A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery’, a digital artwork developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, where everyone is invited to ‘co-author an evolving portrait of the nation’.
An individual’s photograph is transformed into an animated digital portrait based aesthetically on Ms Devlin’s previously executed charcoal and chalk drawings. The moving digital sketch marks resemble a portrait constantly redrawing itself, repeatedly resolving one likeness, followed by another and another, in an expanding sequence of the faces of all who participate.
She employs new technologies with skill, conscious of their transitory nature. ‘You have to flow with the moment where technology still feels like magic, because magic allows us to, for a moment, see through the lens of our actual senses rather than through our preconceived expectancy of what we’re going to see. When you destabilise someone’s perceptions about how coins and cards behave in a magic trick, then you destabilise their perceptions about how blue the sky is and they might look with their eyes, instead of simply assuming they know.’ Devlin never fails to supply the magic that changes those perspectives.
Es Devlin’s 'The Library of the Four Winds' is at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until September 27. ‘The Everythingist’ is at the V&A East, London, until October 18. ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’ will be at the Design Museum, London, from October 2–April 4, 2027
This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
