TRACING TIME

—ES DEVLIN

AN EXHIBITION OF TWELVE NEW WORKS INCLUDING PAINTED TELEVISION SCREENS, LAYERED AND KINETIC SCULPTURAL WORKS, PRINTS, AND PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS ON GLASS.

Es Devlin has maintained a studio practice of drawing, painting and making alongside her three-decade-long career in large scale installation artworks and stage design. Many of these drawings, paintings, maquettes and cardboard sculptures are featured in her sculptural monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin (Thames & Hudson, 2023). The works exhibited in Tracing Time have been made over the past two years in parallel with some of the artist’s recent large scale installation works and stage designs. In Edge Dance, Surfacing and Home is the other we carry inside us, Devlin explores the dialogue and dance between the edges of the human form and the architecture that surrounds it. Water becomes an additional layer in some of the works, expressed as suspended painted glazes (in Drawing not drowning), rain filmed in slow motion (in Surfacing) and the filmed surface skin of a swimming pool (in Not Drowning). These works draw on Devlin’s earliest memory — of not drowning in the River Thames in London aged three, and her reading of a transcendent, near-drowning episode in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Surfacing draws on the themes of drowning and emergent identity in the novels of Margaret Atwood. The Library of Us series, including Iris, Compass and Sketch, was made in the studio in preparation for the monumental Library of Us installation commissioned by Faena Art on Faena Beach. Laser cut circular voids in 6 layers of plywood are offset to form Iris. A mirror laminated triangular extrusion revolves around a vertical axis in Compass. Both works are printed with layers of book and play titles and draw on Devlin’s reading of Umberto Eco’s phrase A Library is a Compass
of the Mind, and Jorge Luis Borges’ text I am not sure I exist actually; I am every book I’ve ever read... while Sketch documents the initial idea for the geometry of the work in pencil, ink and charcoal. Nevada Ark and Redraw the Edges of Yourself were made in 2023 and 2022 respectively. They draw on Devlin’s observational drawings of the endangered species of London and Nevada and express the porosity she felt between the edges of her drawing hand and the geometry of each more-than-human being.