10 Unmissable Highlights from #EsDevlin

The exhibition starts with a recreation of Devlin's studio in Peckham, Southeast London. The room features a 1 to 8 scale study for the 22-metre-tall stage sculpture Devlin conceived for Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, performed at the 2017/18 Bregenz Festival in Austria. On stage, the sculpture was a monumental pair of hands appearing to throw cards up in the air, referencing a scene in Act III of the opera, in which the protagonist reads her fortune in a deck.

One of the oldest pieces of ephemera from Es Devlin’s 50-year archive is a crossword, one in which her father found her name: Esmeralda.

In the same wall-based installation, titled A 50-Year Archive – Part I, is one of Devlin’s earliest diaries and notebooks. It is opened on the first page, where she wrote her name, address, school and class number. Taped down on one of its corners is a portrait photograph over her which she split down the middle: a unique, early experiment in playing with shapes and images.

Es always nurtured an interest for drawing. All her projects start with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper. Among her early two-dimensional works from when she was a student is a painting of her hand on a map, where roads and bifurcations appear similar to veins and capillaries. It suggests a porosity between the edges of her hand and the space around it, or rather, the ways in which the boundaries between self and other blur – a theme she has come back to throughout her career.

In 2003, Es Devlin created a set for Macbeth at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, directed by Keith Warner. The design was inspired by a 17th-century optical viewing cabinet or peep show, that uses forced perspective to create the optical illusion of a fully three-dimensional space. It marked one of Devlin’s earliest uses of the revolving perspective cube motif and mirroring, themes she has returned to ever since. Sketches on display mock-up how the revolving cube would have looked at different points through the play.

A 30-Year Desk features over 30 models from Devlin’s design phases, or maquette-scale recreations – these striking and detailed works show projects that went on to become major public sculptures, stage designs and choral installations. Among these is a scale model of her 2018 set for The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes at London’s National Theatre. Like the unstoppable ‘magical music box called America’ invoked by the playwright, Devlin created a skeletal glass-and-steel structure that propelled the narrative – the parable of American capitalism, from the cotton fields of Alabama to the rising towers of New York City.

This sketchbook is full of drawings and collages that Devlin and her collaborators created while working with U2 on their 2015 Innocence + Experience tour. Rendered in gestural sketches and brushstrokes kinetic transparent LED block enveloped the band within animations of Dublin streets and a tsunami echoing Hokusai’s woodblock print ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa.’

Devlin’s interest in the maze motif can be traced back to her early practice, with mazes appearing in several stage designs, such as the model for a 2006 production of Don Giovanni. This is shown in A 30-Year Desk next to process material and a scale model of her first art installation in 2016, titled Mirror Maze.

Among the exhibition’s bespoke installations is a bright red corridor with a line of light, which visitors walk through. The line of light is a recurring motif within Devlin’s practice, originating in an early memory: when she was two or three years old, she recalls falling into the Thames and, being rescued by her father later waking up to ‘a single line of light, [my] only point of reference to anything.’

Visitors can listen to Devlin’s full memory on Bloomberg Connects.

The exhibition’s finale is a newly commissioned sculpture, featuring over 2,000 books that have informed Devlin’s worldview. These include Chaos by James Gleick, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, Beloved by Toni Morrison and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Books are arranged by colour on one side, and on the other they become a surface on which to project extracts Devlin chose from those books. The eight-metre-wide triangular bookshelf rotates on a circular mirror, invoking Umberto Eco’s description of a library as a compass of the mind.