Elephant writer Osman Can Yerebakan speaks to artist and iconic stage designer Es Devlin to hear her inspiration for her latest show at Cooper Hewitt in New York City.
It was the start of the new millennium, and Es Devlin was in charge of the set design of Antony and Cleopatra at the Royal Shakespeare Company. For the Michael Attenborough directed show, she had a vision of building an elaborate map of the Roman Empire, made out of earth, underneath the Egyptian Nile. “I wanted to create a medley of Egypt and Rome, Antony and Cleopatra, and male and female,” she tells Elephant. Devlin was in collaboration with the production’s engineers to bring her eclectic vision to fruition. When the engineers delivered bad news, the multi-hyphenate set designer and artist was at the theater’s costume department, attaching tiny beads onto a headdress: “They told me, after three days of testing, my idea to build a giant map would be impossible.” She had to come up with a new idea for the set. Instead of panicking, however, Devlin took a breath and went back to sticking beads onto the costume. “The tiny element of what the eye perceives is always important,” she adds.
The grand and the minuscule have been intertwined in Devlin’s three-decade old majestically immersive practice. From dwarfing olympic stadiums to dramatic operatic stages or World Expo, her canvas has been committed to an explosive promise. Between the kinetic and the static, her orchestration of a bond between the show and the audience has relied on the atomic. During our encounter in Basel, Devlin points at the film running on two rectangular screens for her recent BMW commission, Surfacing, during Art Basel. In the first week of June, we are at the Swiss city’s convention center Messe at the fair’s ‘Unlimited’ section, dedicated to larger-than-life works; the Tony and Olivier awards-winner is talking about the moving image which she recorded to accompany a rain-covered stage that she designed for a dance number by contemporary dance choreographer Sharon Eyal. “I was startled to notice later on that one of the dancers in the video was actually wearing black nail polish,” she says. The teeny detail on the finger changed her vision. “Now, it is different than my gesture,” Devlin adds. In her recent display outside Tate Modern, she exhibited renderings of various kinds of beings on plywood, all on the same blow-up scale. She elevated a bee or a butterfly to the same size as a bird which she illustrated as large as a mammal. “I rely on their rhythm equally,” she says. Each raindrop enveloping the dancers’ militantly precise movements in her Basel performance contributes into Devlin and Eyal’s emotional puddle. Starting slow, the bodies crescendo into a potpourri of poetic contortions in seven minutes, soaked in Eyal’s on-point choreography and Devlin’s mellow voice. “First the air is blue, and then bluer, and then green,” her voice utters. “The sea is another story.”
Devlin is a conductor of emotions. The viewer, in her shows, finds themselves surrounded by her electric statements: a pop star’s devotedly-attended mega concert, such as those by Beyonce or Adele; a ritualistically-watched sports event, for example, NFL Super Bowl; a piece of theater that brims with heart-wrenching agony, among them The Lehman Trilogy; or an architectural structure of whimsical curiosity (think: Five Echoes).
The British artist’s first institutional career survey, An Atlas of Es Devlin, at New York’s Cooper Hewitt suggests her galactic range from its title. The survey breaks down pivotal career moments through sketches, constructions, and film. Injecting her unrestrained vision, and scale, into the museum’s architectural limits was a challenge. “I was worried about the height of the ceiling,” she admits. The show coincides with the launch of perhaps the most ambitious outcome of her career: an almost thousand-page Thames and Hudson-released seminal book with a sculptural presence and laser-sharp chronology of her broad oeuvre. “Consider the show a book launch—a nine-month long spectacular book launch,” she says. The title traces the artist’s long creative path, starting with a production of Roy MacGregor’s The Old Vic production of Snake in the Grass in 1995 and reaching its finale with Re-draw The Edges of Yourself, a sculptural formation of her animal kingdom sketches for the member’s club Annabel’s during Frieze in 2022.
A maestro of embodying the imagination in physicality, Devlin still embraces the fruits of new technologies, such as VR or AI, as steps of progression in our layered urge for stimulation. “We might be lost in Henry James while feeling the sea breeze on a beach,” she says. “We are aesthetic creatures who overlay many pieces of information at once.” The amalgamation of senses through pixelated or felt sensations intrigues the artist: “We listen with our elbows, smell with our eyes, and hear with our mouths.”
Different senses’ potential to cross-pollinate was a discovery made during Devlin’s adolescence when she was fascinated by miniature worlds. “I think a lot of children do it on their own,” she explains about encountering her own curiosities. She compares her youth to “Charlie in the Chocolate Factory when they try to assess the egg as good or bad.” Devlin remembers not being able to be categorized as a student, and “the diagnosis for me was theater because it was the only place I could combine art, music, and words which were things I was obsessing over.” A desire to “make worlds” emerged in this transformative period as a mix of her education and unending appetite for models. “We like miniatures and maps because we feel a combination of being in control and a sense of childlikeness through their unusual scale,” says Devlin. “They satisfy that desire for both being lost and the play.”
An Atlas of Es Devlin is on view at Cooper Hewitt through August 11, 2024.
Words by Osman Can Yerebakan
