Es Devlin is one of the most accomplished set designers in the world. She began working in smaller theatres and then moved on to larger productions. She now works with some of the biggest names in music and in fashion – each time constructing fictitious worlds, yet worlds which are able to reawaken our very senses.

We might, actually, already be used to looking at it like this. That is, considering the show as a revelation. It’s highly likely, however, that in our lives, when we have been watching a show – whether a play at the theatre, a concert, an installation or even a fashion show – we have had some sort of sudden realisation. Or, that we have felt so emotionally involved that we have become not only moved but even changed – transformed.

Indeed, this is the essence of Es Devlin’s work – work as a whole rather than myriad works – as a set designer and production designer, famous above all for her work with celebrated fashion houses and singers. She’s much desired. Kanye West, Beyoncé, Florence + The Machine, the Pet Shop Boys and then, of course, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior.

Hailing from London, 51-year-old Es Devlin, began working in small theatres after having completed a course in set design. Since then, she has not once stopped creating worlds in which spectators would be given the opportunity to immerse themselves. And, in order to do so, she has also taken on their particular points of view. From that moment on, she has been setting the scene (so to speak) for certain questions to be asked.

Why restrict yourself to bi-dimensional set designs? Why not show the backs or the sides of objects? Why not enable the audience to feel part and parcel of an installation? And the role played by light, of course. It’s presence – as well as its absence – transforms a space. Playing with mirrors, moving boxes and video projections are all things that we are used to nowadays. Yet, when Devlin introduced them into the set design for Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014, they were almost a total novelty.

Whatever is on the stage is always a container of something else, of a whole host of elements – light, language, music and poetry – which Devlin fills with meaning, and which give the spectators the opportunity to immerse themselves (inside these elements) and to blend in (with them), before they disappear as mere figments of the spectators’ memories. In Don Giovanni, Devlin created a moving, fluid world, turning to the utilisation of video projections as one of the key visual elements so that the protagonist’s seductive ways would come across more fittingly. On the stage, everything took place around a house, two floors high and continually revolving. At other times, however,

Devlin overturns the spectators’ points of observation in order to highlight something unusual, as in Egg, one of the three installations created for The XI Gallery NYC in 2018, a studiously abstract version of New York in which the spectators are seeing the city from above. At the beginning of her creative process Devlin asks herself: “How would I describe something which doesn’t exist?” And it is from that point that her research work commences; work focusing on how things are usually done, how they have changed throughout the history of humanity and how they might continue to be transformed. By working upon the strengthening of archetypes or, conversely, against such models, Es Devlin creates structures which give rise to emotional responses in the spectators. Since all the emotions that we feel exist. And nothing is truer than that.