“Wouldn't it be beautiful to catch a moving image? The blur of movement, the brush of a wing, a hand in motion…” So said the artist Es Devlin as she was dreaming up ideas with the film star Cate Blanchett one late summer’s evening. Though Devlin was in her South London studio, and Blanchett in transit from a day of production, the moment evolved into a wonderful meeting of minds (via Zoom) that would go on to inform a unique collaboration.
To celebrate the 10th edition of Bazaar’s art issue, we brought Devlin and Blanchett together for a special photographic shoot. It seemed a fitting partnership, after all, Bazaar's November edition is an annual tribute to the women in the art world – both the artists themselves and the champions and patrons of female artistic talent.
It’s been an incredible year for Devlin, whose interdisciplinary practice spans eye-popping stage creations for Adele and Beyoncé’s tours, the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and monumental installations such as Memory Palace at Pitzhanger Gallery, which immersed the audience in a landscape shaped by significant leaps in human history over 75 millennia.
In February, she masterminded the staging of the Super Bowl half time show that saw a group of legends – Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar – perform over a map of Compton. (It’s estimated that the performance was watched by 208 million people around the world.) She recently created the dramatic set for the National Theatre’s production of The Crucible, starring Erin Doherty, and will once again be involved in COP27.
And last month, Come Home Again, commissioned by Cartier, was unveiled outside of Tate Modern – a “choral sculpture” consisting of hundreds of images of creatures, each hand-drawn by Devlin. “I was working with the London Wildlife Trust and identified 243 species, which are most at-risk in London,” she explained. “And I decided I would try and draw all 243 of them, which sometimes came to 18 hours of drawing a day.” This painstaking process has culminated into a beautiful supersize structure fashioned in the shape of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the month of September at sunset each night, three choirs performed evensong within the artwork, inviting us to stop and pay attention to the nature – what Devlin calls the “non-human Londoners” – around us.
Having listened to Blanchett’s Climate of Change podcast with Danny Kennedy, Devlin drew on that shared interest in the ecological world for our Bazaar shoot. The artist wanted to recreate her studio for Blanchett to photographed in, surrounded by these illustrations of moths and birds. Some images were a backdrop, some were projected onto the star, some were fashioned round a shape of a giant hand, which symbolised both human agency and the idea of the self extending beyond the skin, and “having a connection with the network of the biosphere”.
Blanchett loved the idea of becoming part of that world and threw herself into the shoot: “It’s almost as though I’m being drawn on,” she said to Devlin. “I become that textured landscaping, after all… it’s interesting that often the female of the species blends into the background.”
The resulting images are as mesmeric as the process of collaboration, bringing attention not just to the art of two creative souls, but the very idea of life itself.
