‘Did you know,” asks Es Devlin, “that you can tell the difference between a wood pigeon and a collared dove from how it emphasises the syllables in its call?” She is sitting at a long table in her home and studio in south London, where big glass doors open on to a leafy garden, as the cooing of a wood pigeon drifts in on the breeze. A nearby table is piled high with pencil drawings of birds, beetles, butterflies and bats, while further illustrations of animals are propped against the walls. It looks like the result of a particularly busy day in an RSPB classroom rather than the lair of a world-famous stage designer. “I’ve been drawing these nonstop for four months,” she says, with an air of exhaustion. “Sometimes for 18 hours a day. I haven’t been out. It’s literally all I’ve been doing.”
When the pandemic hit, and Devlin’s busy schedule of designing spectacular stadium shows was suddenly suspended, her mind turned to the wildlife in her own back yard. She had been working on elaborate stage designs for Beyoncé, Adele, and Cirque du Soleil, but suddenly found her world compressed to counting caterpillars and spotting bee hawk moths with her two children.
“Do you know about the streaked bombardier beetle?” she asks excitedly. “They thought it was extinct, but then 85 of them were found in Tower Hamlets.” The result of this frenzied bout of drawing, and the reason for our meeting, is the imminent opening of one of Devlin’s most prominent and personal projects yet. Outside Tate Modern, opposite St Paul’s cathedral on the banks of the Thames, she will soon unveil an installation designed to call attention to London’s endangered species, a gleaming shrine to soprano pipistrelles, tall fescue planthoppers and bearded tits.
Her sketches of these, and a host of other fish, frogs and fungi, have been enlarged, printed on plywood, and fixed to an illuminated steel and fabric dome, modelled on St Paul’s, inside which choirs from London’s diaspora will perform at sunset for 10 nights. Her renderings give it the look of an animal-themed wedding chapel, the singers surrounded by a frilly veil of her drawings of the 243 species on the capital’s priority list. During the day, visitors will be able to hear recordings of the creatures’ calls, along with intriguing facts read out by Devlin. Did you know that the swift travels the equivalent distance to the moon and back eight times in its life?
“I wanted to get people engaged with these animals emotionally,” she says. “I was inspired by the tradition of evensong – to try to achieve that same level of synaesthetic power, with light, music, texts and architecture, in celebration of Londoners who aren’t human. I’m hoping that people who don’t like moths will think again, or people who eat animals might change their minds.”
Commissioned by luxury jewellery house Cartier rather than the Tate, the project marks Devlin’s latest foray into the world of brand-sponsored immersive art, continuing her voyage beyond the fourth wall of the stage. She is now represented by Pace gallery, with a permanent installation in Miami and a bendy bamboo history of the world show at London’s Pitzhanger Manor under her belt. So is she staking a claim as an artist? “I think ‘multihyphenate’ is the safest way to put it,” she says, citing the late designer Virgil Abloh’s varied oeuvre as an inspiration. “It might be contemporary art, it might be a sneaker design, it might be, you know, a project for social change. But I think where all my work converges is around shifting people’s perspectives.”
Over the last two decades, Devlin has risen to be the most sought-after production designer in the business, revered for conjuring beguiling theatre sets and high-octane stadium shows, subject of a Netflix documentary and a BBC Masterclass. Her designs bring a thrilling, filmic dynamism to the stage – from suspending a rotating floor of a glass office tower above a New York skyline for Sam Mendes’ Lehman Trilogy (which bagged her a Tony award) to memorably burying Hamlet’s castle under a gigantic slag heap for Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2015 take on the Dane.
Her concert designs are equally arresting, whether perching Kanye atop an artificial mountain, floating a futuristic star destroyer above the Weeknd, or having Miley Cyrus slide down a giant model of her own tongue. As her Tate installation opens, it is also possible to see her sets for Don Giovanni and Salome at the Royal Opera House, along with a new production of The Crucible at the National Theatre, not to mention two tours for the Weeknd and Florence + the Machine.
In recent years, however, Devlin has been pursuing work that isn’t based on someone else’s text or the whims of a pop superstar – to the extent, she says, that two-thirds of her studio output is now her own self-initiated art projects. The shift began in 2016, when she created a mirrored maze in a warehouse in Peckham, in partnership with Chanel, after which a series of commissions for immersive Instagram-friendly brand experiences followed. She built a warped oval model of Manhattan that rotated over a pool of water to promote a New York apartment complex by Bjarke Ingels. Then came a zoetrope-like pavilion in Cape Town for Mercedes-Benz, to showcase its electric car technology. For the 2018 London design festival she installed a bright red lion in Trafalgar Square that spouted AI-generated poetry, a theme she further explored at the UK pavilion at the 2021 Dubai Expo.
A pile of planks arranged like a cone on its side, the pavilion generated an AI poem every 90 seconds, using words contributed by visitors that appeared at the end of each piece of wood. Examples included such gnomic lines as “Now I’m in a garden by chance, and the light is all but positivity” and “Papa’s shirt, and the grasshopper coming this way – but this is a weird day for thinking”. It didn’t receive the kind of rave reviews Devlin was used to.
“I have never seen such a waste of public money,” declared Stuart Rose, former boss of Marks & Spencer, after visiting the £44m project with business leaders. “A giant ice-cream cone spouting gobbledegook,” is how someone else described it. Devlin is sanguine. “Some of it was profound,” she says. “Some of it was nonsense. I thought it was a pretty good expression of our country.”
More recently, her use of trees in temporary installations has raised environmental eyebrows, attracting similar accusations of greenwashing as the Marble Arch Mound and Thomas Heatherwick’s jubilee tree-rack. Devlin trucked 400 saplings to the courtyard of Somerset House last year to promote the UN’s sustainable development goals, and imported another forest to Glasgow to create a silvan backdrop for the New York Times Climate Hub at Cop26 a few months later.
Devlin says her arboreal interest was triggered by reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, a multigenerational saga told from the perspective of trees, and she does not seem to have any regrets: “For Cop26, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if the protagonists in that room were not humans, but trees, and you had 197 of them, each bearing witness to what 197 countries might do? It is neuroscientifically proven that you have better conversations among trees – the Japanese even prescribe ‘forest bathing’ – and I think the climate discussions bore that out.”
Her conversation is sprinkled with such environmental nuggets, gleaned from voracious reading, which often provide the starting point for her work. She cites James Gleick, author of Chaos, and the CIA systems theorist turned Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy, alongside Serpentine curator Hans Ulrich Obrist who, she says, “has helped to shape my thesis”. Her Miami installation, for the Superblue gallery, takes the form of another mirrored maze, this time inspired by “the symmetry between the systems in your lungs, which bifurcate with exactly the same frequency as trees”. The theme recurred in a collaboration with Pangaia, for a clothing line launched as a “reminder to take action now” on climate change, each garment printed with a quote from Devlin: “A forest of us, a symbiotic symmetry, a branching geometry that flows within us and around us but do you see it, can you feel it, do you breathe it can you find it – go and find it.”
Such environmental platitudes can sometimes feel at odds with the resource-intensive reality of her work. For a recent fashion show for Yves Saint Laurent in the Moroccan desert, Devlin dug a big circular pond and bathed the surrounding sand dunes in clouds of artificial mist – just as Morocco was suffering the worst drought in 40 years (YSL says that non-drinking water was used in the pond, and it was recycled for irrigation). Also, as a producer of touring rock concerts, her hefty sets are regularly trucked across continents and flown around the planet, emitting countless tonnes of CO2.
“It’s the most important bit of work we still have to do,” she says. “We need to think more about modular systems, about each venue having its own kit of parts, rather than starting from scratch each time.” Aware of her own carbon footprint, Devlin has embarked on a programme of offsetting, contributing to a reforestation project in Brazil and building a school classroom in Malawi with charity AquAid.
The designer, about to turn 51, is taking stock. “I’m halfway through my life and I’ve learned a lot,” she says. “But, in the rest of the days that I’ve got, I want to make work that is really worth the resources put into it. Has everything I’ve ever made been worth the resources? Probably not.”
She says her latest interest is in finding new uses for redundant department stores, inspired by what she calls the “180-fication” of London, referring to 180 The Strand, a postwar office block that has been reborn as a gallery and events space.
“I lie awake thinking about Debenhams,” she says with a chuckle. “Imagine cameras going up and down that shaft where the escalators used to be, and how you could place stages or artworks on different levels within it. Injecting music and theatre into the high street, wouldn’t that be gorgeous?”
Come Home Again is at the Tate Modern garden from 21 September until 1 October. Choral evensong is at sunsets from 22-25 September.
