Books usually stay still until someone picks them up and brings them to life by reading. Not in Es Devlin’s world, where books keep moving, as the new exhibition Es Devlin: Other Worlds at London’s Design Museum demonstrates.
Audiences have encountered these immersive installations of light, sound, and motion before, often marked by revolving bookcases of varying shapes turning in front of or around viewers. Past iterations include Library of Light at the Pinacoteca di Brera during Milan Design Week, Library of Us on Faena Beach for Miami Art Week, and Library of the Four Winds at Castle Howard. Now, for her first European retrospective, Devlin unveils Infinite Library, a giant triangle holding 2,000 books that continuously rotates and reflects within a vast circular mirror.
Describing Devlin with a single word remains a challenge. She is a stage designer moving seamlessly between intimate theaters and massive sports stadiums, an artist, a painter, and a sculptor. Her extensive collaborative roster includes superstar musicians such as Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, U2, Beyoncé, and Mika. She has designed striking sets for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the National Theatre in London, and the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria. Her portfolio also features monumental installations for the V&A and Tate Modern, the inaugural visual experience at The Sphere in Las Vegas, show sets for Louis Vuitton, and a central role as the subject of An Atlas of Es Devlin at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Most recently, she served as the artistic director of Homo Faber, the prominent craft biennial held in Venice.
At the press preview for the exhibition, Tim Marlow, director of the Design Museum, reflected on Devlin’s expansive portfolio. "Es is such a multi-hyphenate. There’s so many things that Es does and is, but ultimately she’s Es Devlin," Marlow told attendees. When questioned about whether her work fits neatly into any single creative category, Devlin challenged the relevance of such distinctions.
"Having just also worked on an exhibition of artisanal objects in Venice, what came up there is these distinctions between genres become ever less urgent as we start now to distinguish between works made by human hand and works made by collective artificial intelligence, frankly," Devlin explained. "So I think there’s going to be less and less emphasis on different ways that humans make things, and more emphasis on the fact that a human hand and embodied consciousness made it."
After spending years defining her career through theater, dance, and live music production, Devlin has concentrated heavily on museum art installations over the past decade. "I’ve made 37 in the last 10 years," she noted. "The focus for me now is museums, art installations. But what I bring to them is the terms of engagement that I’ve learned in a performance environment. So for me it’s critical that when you arrive, I take care of those first moments. I take care of how you gather and I offer you the experience of being a small audience."
That philosophy translates directly into the visitor experience at the Design Museum. Guests gather in groups of 50 inside a dramatic red room before stepping into an almost exact physical reproduction of Devlin’s personal studio. Visitors are given a few moments to roam and take photographs before the environment shifts. Soundscapes, lighting effects, and a moving video chronicling the artist’s life build toward a dramatic scenographic twist. From that point onward, the journey continues through a more traditional museum exhibition layout.
Devlin emphasizes the psychological weight of those opening minutes. "You do what you want as you would normally in a gallery exhibition experience, but I’m bringing those terms of engagement, of performance, of audience, of temporary community to those first five minutes, and it’s critical to me that they are at the beginning of the work, because then that’s the lens through which you see the rest of the show."
This foundational philosophy extends to the recurring motifs visible across the thousands of artifacts on display. "There are forms that recur throughout all of the 5,000 objects that you’re going to see here," Devlin said. "And they are forms like a line of light, a revolving cube, a circle, forms that recurred long before I was born and that will recur long after I’m no longer here."
Although the exhibition originates entirely from her personal career, Devlin intends for the spaces to feel open and accessible, welcoming every visitor into a shared experience. "I think what the installation really expresses is the sense in which anybody’s practice, this happens to be mine, is infused with the worlds of others. Other times, other experiences and I hope that’s what you’ll experience as you go through it."
At the physical and conceptual heart of the exhibition lies a massive display of drawings, sketches, and scale models spanning hundreds of projects. Curator Johanna Agerman Ross, working alongside Danielle Thom and Margherita Dosi Delfini, spent days reviewing thousands of individual pieces, ultimately selecting 5,000 items and organizing them with the assistance of Devlin’s studio staff.
Remarkably, the comprehensive archive survived almost by chance. Devlin recounted the origins of the collection, explaining that when she was 28 years old, she left a long-term relationship taking only a single suitcase. Roughly three years later, her ex-boyfriend—with whom she remained on good terms—contacted her to say he was selling the house and had discovered eight bin bags in the attic. "And I swear to you, most of the stuff that’s on the wall in the early years of the archive, they were in those bin bags in the attic," she recalled. "So I wasn’t consciously keeping the stuff. I put it away. But then when I returned to it, I recognised the value."
While the studio team played a vital role in assembling the exhibition, Devlin is quick to credit her colleagues for sustaining the archive over decades. "In my studio we work as a team of eight designers, and the design team at my studio has been immensely involved in everything you see here. It’s absolutely not a one-person show at all; eight immensely talented women and one guy who work with me, they keep everything. I do a drawing, I hand it to them, they take it forward in technical drawings, a lot of the recent models are made by them, so just as a process they file everything. So that’s also why we have such an archive since 1996."
With numerous international projects running concurrently, Devlin maintains a diverse schedule that reflects her multidisciplinary philosophy. She recently completed a work at the V&A East Storehouse titled The Everythingists, running through October 18. The moniker was originally coined by artist Natalia Goncharova to describe a fluid practice encompassing stage design, performance, fashion, portraiture, and painting.
"I’ve adopted that word now to describe my practice," Devlin noted. "It was coined by Natalia Goncharova, because her practice was in stage design, performance, fashion, portraiture, painting. And she just said, ‘just call me an everythingist.’ And I think it’s something that was much more usual. It’s rather a recent thing that we’ve chosen to limit what’s possible to specialism. I think this renaissance approach to being able to express through multiple modes of inquiry is something I’ll continue."
Devlin admits it took her until a decade ago to fully define her independent artistic voice. Moving forward, she plans to center her practice around museum art installations and smaller-scale works, noting an upcoming November exhibition at Soho House. At the same time, she continues to push boundaries in commercial and classical performance spaces, pointing to Olivia Rodrigo’s tour—created in collaboration with Hussein Chalayan—and a production of Don Giovanni currently running at the Opera House. "So, yes, I relish what each of these modes of practice brings."
The exhibition concludes in a final room dominated by the giant rotating library. Its 2,000 books, provided by Penguin Random House UK, are arranged in a vibrant rainbow pattern. Here, visitors are invited to sit and read selections from the literary works that shaped Devlin’s own worldview, including James Gleick’s Chaos, David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. These volumes served as the original portals through which Devlin entered new intellectual realms—the very "other worlds" she now constructs through her own artistic practice.
Es Devlin: Other Worlds runs from October 2, 2026, through April 4, 2027, at the Design Museum in London.
