Drawing the Edges of Ourselves: Es Devlin on Art as Activism

Few artists today bridge the realms of installation, performance, language, and activism quite like Es Devlin. Known for creating transformative environments across disciplines—from stage operas and stadium concerts to Olympic ceremonies and museum installations—Devlin has, over three decades, shaped a singular artistic vocabulary defined by light, form, and audience. Her work doesn’t simply exist in space—it choreographs an experience, often aiming to shift perception, invite introspection, or inspire collective awe.

In her first major monograph, released in 2023, An Atlas of Es Devlin, the London-based artist and stage designer’s work reveals its woven makeup through sketches, photographs, personal reflections, and texts over the past several decades. Acting like a functional retrospective, the tactile book-object took seven years to make, mapping out the constellation of through lines in her work—from childlike curiosity and makeshift creativity to rigorous academic study and, eventually, large-scale spectacle. In its pages, Devlin shines a light on her early creative life—not in theaters or museums, but in libraries and living rooms, making string-and-yogurt-carton inventions as a child in 1980s England. With limited resources but endless imagination, she cultivated a practice of “expressing love through making”—a concept that still guides her immersive art today. 

Her entry into stage design came not through certainty, but through curiosity: the messy red room of Central Saint Martins‘ stage design program stayed open late, offering more freedom than the clean white studio of a printmaking course. That decision led to a decade of theatrical commissions and collaborations, eventually evolving into monumental concert sets for artists like Kanye West, Beyoncé, Adele, and U2; sculptural installations for brands like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and Chanel; and impactful art experiences like Mirror Maze and Forest of Us—the latter an evocative mirrored environment at Superblue Miami that connects the anatomy of human lungs with the branching structures of trees.

All of Devlin’s environments are embedded with a sculptural and emotional intent, the spiritual ritual of live performance, and a special material central to her practice: not just text, light, or architecture, but the audience itself. Whether in immersive installations like Come Home Again or Redraw the Edges of Yourself, or through collaborative moments with fashion designers and musicians, Devlin’s work asks its audiences to become more than passive spectators. It invites them to feel, to see themselves in others, and to question the boundaries between self and environment, art and activism.

Whitewall spoke with the artist about the layered roles of language, collective experience, light, and empathy in her work, and how all of her creations aim to evoke feeling, participation, and change. 

Es Devlin on the Audience

WHITEWALL: You’ve spoken about the idea of audience as the protagonist. Do you think about designing environments that elicit or prompt emotional or intellectual engagement, rather than just kind of like passive observation? 

ES DEVLIN: During the first five years of my practice in theatre, opera, and dance, I learned that the material we were crafting was the audience’s response—the audience’s emotions. That’s what you’re sculpting, carving, assembling. The sense of satisfaction that you might feel if you sculpted a perfect curve in clay, or achieved a breathtaking hum of adjacent colors in paint, for theater makers, that achievement is found in the audience’s response. It’s not just their clapping at the end: it’s their gasp, it’s the moment they all lean in, it’s the moment when they’re trying not to cry, or when the hairs on their arms have gone up. That is the clay, the paint, the wood: that’s the material that you’re working with.

There was a period around 2000 where I started treading water in my practice. Theater is quite hierarchical, as a designer, your role is secondary to the director, and I wasn’t finding my place within the order of things. So, it was fortuitous that in 2003, I started being invited to work with musicians on pop concerts. I began to author loose narratives responding to the primary texts of the lyrics, the intention, and the music. I discovered that the techniques I’d learned in small and medium-sized theaters could translate at scale for many thousands in arena and stadia. I felt weirdly emboldened to use my own voice more as an author—which was quite surprising, given the power of the celebrated characters I was collaborating with.

Another pivotal point in my practice came in 2015 in collaboration with Nicolas Ghesquière. It was an installation called Series 3 at 180 The Strand in London. It wasn’t a runway show, but an inversion of one. Nicolas invited me to create an environment that responded to the ideas behind his fashion collection, but without any models. That was the first time I was offered a commission to make a work with no protagonist other than the sculpture, the environment.

Since 2016, I’ve been making a sequence of installation works which invite the viewer, the audience, to become active participants in the work. The ambition of each work is a shift of perspective within those who experience it. The work isn’t really satisfied with anything less. The work isn’t satisfied unless the hairs go up or there’s a slight tear in the eye.

For 30 years I’ve sat among audiences of all sizes, learning their ways, observing the audience as a species. In an art gallery, a museum, a theater, or a stadium, you can sense the frequency, the resonance, the vibration between a work of art and a person receiving it. That’s where the art happens.

“The material we were crafting was the audience’s response,”

-Es Devlin

WW: You’ve spoken about the material you work with when it comes to other people, but another material you work with is text. Of what importance is language to your work?

ED: When I was younger, I hated the sound of my own voice, like a lot of people do. If I heard my voice recorded, I’d go, “Ugh, is that really what I sound like?” I didn’t recognize myself in my voice. Then I had my children, in 2007 and 2010, and I read to them every night. I think my diaphragm probably changed—my body changed, chemically, the oxytocin that’s in your body when you are skin-to-skin connected with a child, I think that changed my voice. It certainly changed my perception of my voice and my ability to use my voice as an instrument. I had always been an instrumentalist, and I’d worked with the voices of others, but I hadn’t worked with my own voice before. I started to work with the fusion of voice and music and image. I’m less interested in text alone—or any of those things alone. I’m interested in what happens when they meet. 

I’ve been reading a lot lately about life unmediated by language. It seems many of us feel conflicted in our use of language, because language is something we are in love with, and we love to craft, yet we know that language is part of a system of separating ourselves—through indexing and identifying and classifying, from being part of the whole. It seems that the left hemisphere has always been in the business of identifying and separating, classifying. Originally, it was to identify what was food. The right hemisphere has always been more tuned to perceive the bigger picture, to place oneself in relation to a horizon, I think originally to avoid becoming food. There’s a sort of evolutionary logic to why the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in different modes, but there’s a compelling argument from a number of neuroscientists that our current moment as a species is disabled by an imbalance—that the left hemisphere, governed by language and indexing, classification, and separation, has become overly dominant, and our right hemisphere, that recognizes continuity between self and other, between human and biosphere, has become less resonant to us as a result.

Part of what my work wants to do is to try, in its way, however small, to be part of addressing that imbalance. 

Activism as Art

WW: In your work over the years, you’ve also focused on the environment. Do you see your work as activism?

ED: I do see my work as activism. I see it as an activism that works almost like acupuncture, where you take the needle and you ask, “Which point do I need to press to activate at the most resonant frequency?” It’s very ambitious. It’s learned from the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh. I went on an artists’ retreat at his monastery Plum Village, in southwest France. I would recommend it to everyone. It’s a tradition I’ve been reading about for a long time. Thich Nhat Hanh was a peace activist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, responsible, through Dr. King’s amplification of his voice, for turning American public opinion against the Vietnam War. His mode of activism was less about marching into the world with a placard, and more about getting under the bonnet of people’s minds. 

If you can alter someone’s perception to not see a tree as “other” because you’ve recognized that it’s governed by the same mathematics as your own lungs, that’s a piece of activism. It’s just that the activation is within a person’s mind. But to me, that’s the place. If you think of a protractor, if you can change anything in the center, it will change all of the actions that radiate out from there. Whereas the closer you get to the circumference of a protractor, the more complex and strenuous it is to activate change.

“I do see my work as activism,”

-Es Devlin

WW: You made a work last year named Congregation with the Courtauld at St. Mary le Strand Church in London. Did that feel like activism?

ED: It was made as a direct result of having witnessed what was happening in Britain in response to the crisis in Ukraine—the porosity that the country was capable of towards Ukrainian refugees. Yet, still, in parallel, the brittleness and the inability to welcome refugees from other countries. 

There was a language around “stop the boats” and “invasions on the beaches” in relation to refugees from Sudan and Yemen, while at the same time, it was “open the schools” and “open the homes” to refugees from Ukraine. My mother and father still have three Ukrainians living with them. Homes for Ukrainians was a brilliant scheme; it revealed the best of us. But why not the same porosity towards the Somalians and the Sudanese and the Afghans? I didn’t understand. 

It became resonant for me because I had just finished a project called “Come Home Again” outside Tate Modern. I had been asked to make a portrait of Londoners. And I made a portrait of Londoners who are not human. It turns out there are 15,000 species of Londoners, and only one of those species is human. The other 14,999 are birds and moths and bats and trees and woodlice and all sorts of beautiful creatures that don’t happen to be human. I thought it would be a good piece of learning to draw them and to learn their names. I sat down for four months and made closely observed pencil drawings of 250 of the most endangered of them. By the end of that four months, the act of drawing taught me the porosity of my own hand. 

I remember looking at my own hand and literally seeing the continuity of the veins in my hand with the veins of a bat’s wing, the scales on my hand with the scales on a snake’s skin, the knuckles of my hand with the shape of the bones of a bird’s wing. I made a piece about that, which is called Redraw the Edges of Yourself.

The encounter with the porosity at the edges of my own hand self-led me to investigate further the porosity of people in my community. I approached United Nations High Commission for Refugees and we discussed ideas for a year. They helped me to architect a series of encounters with those who are “other” to me. I’d made portraits of friends and family in the past, as well as quick sketches of strangers on the underground, furtively, when I was a student. This project allowed me the privilege of encountering 50 strangers from 28 countries in conflict.

Each would knock at my studio door, and I would welcome them and then start to draw their portrait. I knew only their first name and I purposely did not know anything else. I didn’t know where they came from. I knew they had the word ‘refugee’ stamped in their passport, but that could mean they’d been living in this country since they were six months old, or it could mean they’d arrived by small boat six months ago. I didn’t know. We worked without talking, listening to Max Richter’s music, for 45 minutes—with music and silence, nonverbal communication, just two faces meeting one another. I observed my unconscious biases run riot. I was meeting a stranger, but I was also encountering the strangers within myself. All those strangers, all those people I think I’m not, all those biased people I think I’m not, they were there saying, “Hi!” So, I said, “Hi, biases! Good to meet you. Now I know you’re there.”

“I’m interested in the nonverbal,”

-Es Devlin

WW: You mentioned that these portraits were “co-authored” with the sitter. What did you mean by that? 

ED: I consider every work to be co-authored, to be honest. If you’ve stood at Glastonbury with 200,000 people singing one of those songs that we might call a contemporary hymn, you realize that although they were written by one person drawing from their specific lived experience, the reason they resonate so powerfully with so many is because they draw from ancestral currents that swell within all of us. Co-authorship doesn’t have to mean compromise. I think it’s the ability to become a vessel for what you receive from your times. Any portrait of a person is co-authored. 

If you are Jenny Saville making her extraordinary portraits, or Lucian Freud, or Francis Bacon, or Frank Auerbach, you have made a sacrament of your life in order to be able to build those portraits. It’s an absolute dedication to marking the traces in paint of the time and light that passes between you and your sitter.

Tracing Personal Mythology 

WW: Your book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, was released in 2023, followed by a retrospective at Cooper Hewitt that closed last year. While making this over the course of seven years, how did you reflect on your creative practice?

ED: Every time I gathered together photographs of all the works, models, and sketches, and put them in chronological order, my team would press a book together for me to show me what the book was going to feel like. It was very rich, but it was exhausting. It was like “breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner” over 30 years. It wasn’t nourishing—it was just tiring. I knew I wanted it to be a sculptural object, and the pop-up effects we added just made it even more tiring. It was impressive, but exhausting and not nourishing.

We knew we needed to find a system for organizing the material in a more coherent, cumulative way. In the end, the first chunk of the book is as if you’re sitting in my studio in the afternoon in daylight looking at white paper sketches, no photographs, no finished works: sketches, layers of tracing paper, fold-outs, cut-outs, the oldest pieces go back to the ‘80s, when I was 13 years old. The next section is as if you’ve come to a theater or a church and you’re seeing all the works as illuminated forms emerging out of darkness. It’s like a series of stained-glass windows, and at that point, you’ve abandoned chronology, and the works are just presented in order of forms. All of the lines of light, all of the spheres, all of the cubes. The last part of the book is as if you’ve now come onto the stage, backstage, or into the art installation. And those are arranged as a spectrum of color. You’re saturated in red, then you’re saturated in orange, then you’re saturated in yellow. At last, the book wasn’t exhausting. Next, I had to write the book—to stitch myself and my time into it. 

I reflected on what was happening in London, in England, what was happening around the world—while I was sitting in these dark spaces making these works. I attempted to weave the story of me and my peers at work into our time. Writing the book changed me.

WW: How would you describe an “Es Devlin” work?

ED: I think there are a number of threads that recur throughout my practice. In the book, I tried to trace them. It’s sort of my own mythology. I examined why I like to make lines of light, and I traced it back to this early experience of falling in the Thames. My earliest memory is nearly drowning. I didn’t know I was nearly drowning, but I remember there being water and little stones falling, and the green-gray of the Thames, and seeing some light. It took me a long time to learn to swim afterwards. 

I also tried to think about why I enjoy revolving forms, and I traced it back to a small, red, Bakelite record player—this old 1970s thing. That was the only thing that made music in our house. We only had four records, and they were black, shiny revolving LPs. What I was looking at was having an effect on how I was listening. That connection between eyes and ears. For me, music was a round black thing rotating within a red cube. Those archetypal forms of revolving cubes and spheres and discs and lines—these forms that recur throughout art history, design, no matter which place on the planet you are—I enjoy participating in the great dance through history of working with these archetypal forms. I feel that I’m participating with every artist who’s worked with them through time.