A world in the making: Es Devlin’s 30-year practice at London’s Design Museum

Es Devlin: Other Worlds brings three decades of the British artist and designer’s multidisciplinary practice to London’s Design Museum. On view from October 2nd, 2026 through April 2027, the exhibition gathers sculpture, stage design, film, drawings, models and archival material, offering insight into the ideas and processes behind Devlin’s most ambitious works.

Among the season’s notable London cultural events, the exhibition offers an unusually close look at a practice more often encountered through monumental public installations, concert stages and major cultural commissions.

From the studio to the museum

Conceived and designed in close collaboration with Devlin, Other Worlds begins with a recreation of her South London studio before moving through projects spanning theatre, opera, music, architecture and public art. Hundreds of drawings, photographs, personal objects and ephemera appear alongside more than 30 detailed maquettes.

Drawing remains a defining thread throughout the exhibition. Early sketches, paintings, collages, diaries and prints form A 50-Year Archive – Parts I and II, tracing an artistic language that continues to underpin Devlin’s work across mediums and scales.

Landscapes in light

Among the exhibition’s highlights is Come Home Again, Mirrored, a new iteration of Devlin’s 2022 installation first shown outside Tate Modern. The original took the form of a cross-section of St Paul’s Cathedral’s dome, illuminated with silhouettes of endangered moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish and fungi. Commissioned by Cartier with guidance from the London Wildlife Trust, the work returns with a mirrored ceiling, creating a shifting landscape shaped by Devlin’s interest in nature, atmosphere and perception.

A 30-Year Desk turns the archive into an artwork of its own. Concentric circular desks hold hundreds of objects from Devlin’s career, from concept drawings and photographs to personal artefacts and more than 30 maquette-scale models. Projects such as The Lehman Trilogy, Forest of Us, the London 2012 Olympic Games Closing Ceremony and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show appear alongside kinetic stage sculptures created for international concert tours.

The installation focuses on the creative process itself, allowing visitors to trace ideas from sketches and models towards large-scale environments.

A practice built on imagination

Devlin began her career in small-scale theatre before developing a practice spanning museums, galleries, opera houses, arenas and stadia worldwide. Her work moves between sculpture, stage design, music, language and light, often pairing theatrical spectacle with questions of ecology, collective experience and shared space.

Other Worlds places these different strands side by side, revealing recurring ideas and visual instincts across projects created for radically different contexts.

Devlin has received the London Design Medal, multiple Olivier, Tony, Emmy and Critics Circle awards, as well as fellowships from the Royal Academy of Music and Royal Society of Arts. She was appointed CBE for services to design.

At the Design Museum, the emphasis falls not only on finished spectacles but on the drawing, thinking and experimentation that precede them. Es Devlin: Other Worlds remains on view through April 2027.

In our conversation, Es Devlin reflects on the discipline of daily practice, her vision for architecture, and the power of art to shape spaces for collective experience. She speaks about reconnecting humanity with nature and the role of imagination in shifting how we perceive the world.