es devlin’s rotating library holds 2,000 books inside london’s design museum
the artist brings her studio, decades of drawings and models, as well as a well-used collection of books into the galleries.
es devlin’s library begins on her own shelves
Some of the books in Es Devlin’s new installation still show signs of use. More than 2,000 volumes fill an eight-meter-wide triangular shelf, including copies taken from her studio. There is James Gleick’s Chaos, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The books are arranged by color, a visual order imposed on a collection built over years of reading.
Called An Infinite Library, the sculpture turns above a circular mirror at the Design Museum in London. Projections move across the shelves while Devlin’s recorded voice reads selected passages. It occupies the final room of Es Devlin: Other Worlds, her first retrospective in Europe, opening October 2nd, 2026.
a studio opens into a 30-year archive
The Design Museum exhibition starts at the other end of the process, inside a recreation of Es Devlin’s South London studio. Books and maquettes line the shelves. Drawings, tools and paint cover her desk. From there, visitors encounter the work that grew out of these materials, from theater sets to installations made for museums and concert stages.
A series of concentric desks holds drawings, photographs and more than 30 models from Devlin’s design process. The display includes work connected to The Lehman Trilogy, the London 2012 Olympics closing ceremony and Forest of Us in Miami. Along the gallery walls, sketches and collages reach further back into her school years. Their scale is small, even when the projects they preceded filled an arena.
older works find a new setting
Come Home Again also returns to London, four years after its presentation outside Tate Modern. Its cut-out drawings of endangered species once illuminated a structure based on a section of St Paul’s Cathedral dome. At the Design Museum, the work sits beneath a mirrored ceiling, changing how visitors see its dense collection of moths, birds and plants.
The library closes the exhibition with a different kind of archive: the books Devlin has kept close. It follows three earlier sculptural libraries she made in Milan, Miami and Yorkshire, and is the first of the series installed inside a museum. After the show ends, books supplied by Penguin Random House UK will be donated to local schools and charities.
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project info:
name: Es Devlin: Other Worlds
artist, designer: Es Devlin | @esdevlin
museum: Design Museum | @designmuseum
dates: October 2nd, 2026 — April 4th, 2027
curators: Johanna Agerman Ross, Danielle Thom, Margherita Dosi Delfini, in collaboration with Es Devlin and her studio
photography: © Daniel Devlin, © Luke Hayes, © David Parry
