An Island of Light1- 30 September 2026
Es Devlin
©Victor Picon

Es Devlin

London, United Kingdom

A journey in craft, celebrated through illumination

British artist and designer Es Devlin views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works. Her major installation works have focused on some of London's most vital communities: In Congregation (2024) 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. In 2018 Es painted one of Trafalgar Square's bronze lions fluorescent red and invited visitors to feed it words that formed a collective poem projected onto Nelson's Column. She designed Dear England at the National Theatre (2023) which brought together the UK's football and theatre communities, the UK Pavilion at the World Expo (2021) which gathered millions of visitors' words into a global collective poem, the 2022 Superbowl Halftime show and the London 2012 Olympics Closing Ceremony.

Es has collaborated with master artisans throughout her 30-year career and has a deep respect for craftsmanship. As Artistic Director for Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light, she has created a concept that showcases the skills and talents of craft artists selected from around the globe by framing their work with light, a primordial force that is not only at the heart of her own artistic practice but is also essential to craft, to raw materials and to human life. Inspired by the archipelago of the Venetian lagoon, Es has imagined a narrative that unites the work of hundreds of individual makers, each an island of talent and skill within the wider waters of craftsmanship, on San Giorgio Maggiore.

Es Devlin

London, United Kingdom

ADDRESS

Address upon request, London, United Kingdom

AVAILABILITY

By appointment only

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