Wallpaper* Design Awards 2025: Es Devlin reflects on the past and imagines the future

Artist and stage designer Es Devlin works across mediums, celebrating public participation in exhibitions, large scale performances and immersive installations. Here, she reflects on her personal and professional highlights of 2024 and shares her predictions for 2025

I have spent the last few years thinking extensively about the word ‘home’.

The forces which shaped my work in 2024 have been building for the last couple of years. I spent much of 2022 making closely observed drawings of 243 of the 15,000 species that call London home, learning as I progressed through close encounters with our city’s resident moths, birds, bats, insects, amphibians and fungi, the continuity or line and form between us and the biosphere. I began to understand, through a daily practice of observing and drawing, the urgency of Joanna Macy’s invitation to us to ‘relinquish our separation, come home again to our mutual belonging’.

In 2023 I sought a home for my own 30 year long art and design practice as I charted it into An Atlas of Es Devlin: a book and an exhibition that gathered the strands of a multi-faceted practice into a continuous thread of intention, stitched and anchored into the context of the past three decades. While writing the book and composing the exhibition I discovered that many of the concerns that preoccupy me today are rooted in marks and gestures I began making as a teenager: the exercise of looking back and assembling the fragments and traces, has helped guide and root the forward trajectory of my practice.

Throughout 2024, and always, I have valued the ability to practice in a range of mediums and registers - it expands the potential reach of the work. A single train of thought often weaves through an array of contexts.

Looking back at 2024, a few lines of enquiry, many ongoing from earlier years, progressed through a sequence of projects. I have already begun to consider how they might continue to evolve in 2025. If I had to give them a single name it would be: an ongoing attempt to see through the eyes of others.

I spent much of 2024 in one room in South London drawing the faces of strangers in chalk and charcoal as I continued the ongoing project of learning to see the world through perspectives that are not my own. Meanwhile, marks and gestures that I and my studio team had made and expanded into designs and schemes were being realised by talented teams of fabricators and programmers around the world.

In January I sat in St Mary Le Strand church on the Strand in London listening to the potent string cacophony of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge by candlelight in preparation for Congregation, an installation of portraits of those who come to London seeking sanctuary which would open in the church in October.

While writer/curator Ekow Eshun and I discussed collaborating on the project in April, a white horse and a black horse, Vida and Quaker, were seen running along the Strand, one streaked in blood. In the following days the image caught our collective imagination across the country, like a Shakespearean portent. I think we are unnerved when we see animals run wild in the city, because it reminds us at once of two things: 1: the city is not designed for animals to run wild in: they are vulnerable to its sharp edges and corners. 2: We too are wild animals, trying to remember our running roots amidst the stones and slabs of the city.

When London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan secured an historic third term, and as we awaited the date of what we assumed would be an autumn general election, it felt like a political shift was underway. At this time, I had completed about a third of the charcoal portraits and and emerged from the studio later in May, cycling back over the river to 180 Strand to help compose the arrangement of 365 sketchbooks on a wall deep in its subterranean labyrinth as part of the Reverb exhibition with Theaster Gates, Jeremy Deller and Julian Knxx. When it opened, we gathered around our small screens to witness Rishi Sunak’s rain soaked declaration of a surprise summer election.

By now I was making up to 5 portraits a day to complete all 50 by the end of the summer .During the first week of August some of my portrait participants cancelled their visits to my studio: they did not feel safe to leave their homes and cross the city as rioting unfolded in the wake of the tragic stabbing of 3 young girls at a dance class by a 17 year old in Southport. As reports filled the radio of attacks on refugee hostels around the country, accounts began to surface of local communities bringing brooms and bin bags to clean up the streets, and counter protests around London and the rest of the country holding calmly courageous banners: ‘Refugees are welcome here.’

When we began the Congregation project with London’s refugee community we thought that its October opening might coincide with an ever hardening discourse on migration in the lead up to an anticipated November election. We didn’t predict that 12 year olds would be kicking at the doors of hostels harbouring those who come here seeking sanctuary.

By now the portraits were nearly complete and we worked with a team in York to print and prepare them for installation while composing the soundtrack with London choirs singing Bruckner’s sacred motet Locus Iste in Latin, Zulu, Xhosa and Bulgarian - it translates as ‘This Place'.

I spent a lot of the year on my bike, cycling over the river between St Mary le Strand church where we were installing the 50 double life sized portraits over an 8 metre high tiered structure, and the National Theatre where we began rehearsals with David Oyelowo for a new production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus - another story of exile and study of societal structures, which opened on 11th September.

And I continue to sit with these 50 portraits - now installed at Somerset House as part of Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers until 12 Jan 2025. I now receive every news story through the lens of these resilient and resplendent Londoners that I’ve got to know. When I awoke to the result of the American election I heard it through their ears. As news flows to us from Syria today, I try to perceive it through the eyes of the five magnificent London Syrians who met my gaze this summer.

I have noticed changes in the last year. I think we become ever less tolerant of lack of meaning. I think we listen out for a clear top line melody that permeates the noise. I think we sense that curiosity means care. We feel anchored to the earth when we make things with our hands. Artists and artisans' studios are accessible through countless videos of people making things online.

My Instagram is a curated stream of timelapse videos of the making hands of ceramicists, painters, paper sculptors, woodcarvers. It encourages me because it communicates the sense that the process is as much the work as the final object, that objects are vessels of time and life.

I think we will become ever more curious about the creative process and how making helps us thrive, and ever less preoccupied with accumulation.

I think we will become ever more keen to understand the etymology of each object we encounter: who made it, who mined it, where was it sourced, how far did it travel, how old were the hands that stitched it or carried it, how many hours did they work in a week.

I think objects will begin to behave like Dorian Grey’s portrait: not fixed at the point of completion, but mutable and eloquent of the processes beneath them.

As we continue to recognise that humans are neither the centre nor the apogee of intelligence, we will perceive that there have always been intelligences other than our own - the intelligence of plants and mountains and rivers and roots and seeds.

As we look towards 2025, I think each of us will continue, with ever greater urgency, to seek devices of orientation and sources of solace amidst the ever noisier torrent of stimuli, information and crises in which we find ourselves encompassed and entangled.

I and many of my colleagues seek guidance and clarity in each book we read, each work of art, each audience we are part of, each encounter and conversation. We are planning to spend much of 2025 collating these illuminating phrases into a freely available reference resource - creating a home for them, a library that behaves like a navigational compass to help us chart our paths.

Here are a few of the phrases that are guiding me into the coming year:

Rituals are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable.

Byung Chul Han

Thing number one is that the Earth is madly in love with you and you need to participate in the romance.

Lean Penniman

Es Devlin's first monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin, is out now

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today