CURRENT EXHIBITION

About the Artist

British artist Es Devlin (born London 1971) views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works. 

In Congregation (St Mary le Strand/PAC NYC 2024/25) she made chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who brought their gifts to the city having experienced displacement. In Come Home Again (2022) she drew 243 of London's most endangered species and installed them outside Tate Modern underscored by London's diasporic choirs, while her digital artwork Nevada Ark highlighted Nevadan endangered species at U2’s inauguration of the Sphere, Las Vegas in 2023. Seeking technologies that allow greater numbers of people to participate in her collective artworks, she began collaborating with Google Arts & Culture Lab a decade ago: first on Poemportraits (2016) at the Serpentine Galleries, then Singing Tree (2017), a collective carol at the V&A. In Please Feed the Lions (2018) she painted one of Trafalgar Square's stone lions fluorescent red and invited visitors to feed it words that formed a collective poem projected onto Nelson's Column, and her UK Pavilion at the World Expo (2021) gathered millions of visitors' words into an global collective poem. Devlin is known also for her performance designs, including Dear England at the National Theatre (2023) which brought together the UK's football and theatre communities, and The Lehman Trilogy (2018) which explored the mechanics of western capitalism over 3 hours with 3 actors and a piano. Her monumental revolving libraries, Library of Light (Pinacoteca di Brera Milan 2025) and Library of Us (Faena Beach Miami 2025) gathered audiences of thousands to read books together. Screenshare (2023) invited each audience member to take home a piece of a cinema screen formed of 30 years of her sketches. First shown at 180 Studios, it is now being exhibited in Sao Paulo and Mumbai, while her V&A East commission, The Everythingists is currently on display at the V&A East Storehouse. 

Devlin and her design studio create kinetic stage designs globally, including at the Metropolitan Opera NYC, Royal Opera House and the National Theatre. They also conceive Olympic Ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large scale stadium concerts with celebrated musicians. Her practice is being documented in a series of retrospective exhibitions: currently at Casa Bradesco São Paulo, the Design Museum in London (from September 2026), Futura Seoul (from August 2026) and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (2023-2024). 

Devlin has been awarded the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), The Critics Circle Award in the Visual Arts, The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards and a Tony Award. She has been honoured by the Emmy Awards and Ivor Novello Awards and has been appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts. She is the recipient of a CBE for Services to Design and has been appointed as a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and the University of the Arts London, Oxford University Bloomberg Digital Fellow and Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at the University of Oxford. 

Devlin is the subject of Thames & Hudson’s award-winning monographic sculptural book, An Atlas of Es Devlin. She is a student of Zen in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh and lives and works in southeast London with her husband and two teenage children.