The Londoner is the set designer big names turn to for eye-popping spectacle. As a new retrospective opens, she gives the Guardian a glimpse at her studio

Four years ago, the V&A East Storehouse in east London got in touch with Es Devlin. The museum’s curators wanted to invite the British artist and designer to respond to a 100-year-old theatrical backdrop by the Russian artist and designer Natalia Goncharova. For a 1926 London production of The Firebird by the Ballets Russes, Goncharova had painted a fortified Muscovite cityscape festooned with onion domes and spires, rust-red and golden against a deep-blue sky. Devlin didn’t know much about Goncharova. But alighting on the term she had favoured for describing her kaleidoscopic approach to art-making, Devlin realised she’d found a kindred spirit. “She called herself an ‘everythingist’,” Devlin says, a smile in her eyes.

Works in progress in Devlin’s studio

He stood down as boss of the NT – and threw himself into kayaking, writing and DIY. The veteran director talks about his new start aged 60, mourning his mother – and directing Death of a Salesman in Turkish

There were several big endings for Rufus Norris in 2025, all crammed into the same few seismic months. Firstly, the close of his tenure as director of the National Theatre after a decade at the helm. That planned ending collided with the loss of his mother, who died three weeks before he left the NT. On top of that, a significant birthday concluding his 50s.

So what did Norris do after turning 60, on the other side of the Big Job, alongside the grief of losing a parent? DIY, plenty of kayaking and a house move, it turns out: “It felt important to have a complete break,” he says. “I’m a bit of a workaholic, but I’m also a bird of simple brain so I can as easily lose myself in how to build a shed or do up a place.”

A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery aims to bring people together in increasingly atomised country

Can a collective portrait of Britain hold together a country that feels as if it is splintering apart? That is the quietly radical hope behind Es Devlin’s new installation at the National Portrait Gallery: a living portrait comprised not of monarchs, politicians or celebrities but of thousands of ordinary faces drifting slowly into and out of one another.

Created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery invites people across the UK to upload a selfie, which is then transformed into a portrait rendered in Devlin’s smoky charcoal-and-chalk style before joining a constantly evolving and revolving carousel of portraits projected on to a framed screen.