DESIGNER BIO
Es Devlin is a multi-talented artist and designer known for her large-scale installations, revolving cubes, and intimate performative sculptures. Devlin's work combines language, congregation, music, and light.
This show was the first of many concert set designs created by Devlin, who has since had a hugely successful career creating large-scale performative sculptures and environments for artists like Beyonce, U2, The Rolling Stones, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, Adele, Kanye West, and the Weekend, to name a few. Devlin has shown work all over the world, at festivals like Coachella, the Brit awards, fashion shows for Louis Vuitton, at the Royal Opera, and even the Olympics.
Devlin’s goal for the 2003 concert stage design for Wire was to anatomize the rock band. Devlin designed and installed a light projection show and sculpture of the four band members inside of four individual cubes lined with mirrors, gauze, and projection screens. These cubes held projected images of the band members' faces and time-codes onto the gauze screen stapled to the cubes, which the band was stuck inside. The cubes acted as a juxtaposition to the closeness the audience felt, being intimately presented with their faces, while the band was entirely separated from the audience and each other.
Devlin uses these techniques of the cube as metaphor and the projected imagery of faces to draw out of the audience a reaction of their awareness of their anticipation and passing of time, longing and intimacy. Because of this, Devlin's real instrument is the audience, understanding more than most how to control their emotional interactions; how to converse with crowds.