Es Devlin describes sleeping in a forest shelter she built as a teen, which ended up exhibited at Tate Britain.
White jeans start the conversation. Es talks about the bow shape, the frayed bottoms, and buying four pairs once she found the thing she wanted to wear every day. It begins as a clothing question, but the answer slips somewhere more private. Clothes are less decoration here than evidence: rhythm, body, attention, and need, all showing up in what someone reaches for without overthinking it. Morning takes over from there. Es describes setting an alarm for seven, then giving herself until seven thirty to stay in bed with a passage by David Abrams. Gravity is doing the holding. She talks about sleep as the body's meeting with planetary force, every cell yielding alongside other sleeping bodies. Then the light arrives. A narrow strip comes through the blinds and hits the wall, and the room starts to feel like a camera catching atoms from the nearest star. It is quietly ecstatic, but not showy. The pleasure comes from noticing where she is: earth underneath, sunlight arriving from very far away. Attention is where the conversation keeps landing. Es brings in Ian McGilchrist's writing on the different kinds of attention in the two sides of the brain. Detail matters, but she keeps circling back to the wider, stranger kind of perception that can hold bodies, rooms, light, sleep, and thought at once. By the end, self-portraiture has turned inward. Es describes making huge, then smaller, then medium portraits through a magnifying mirror, never able to see the whole of herself at once. The image gets more exposed, yet she says the portraits also effaced her, until she was almost hidden and only peering through. Somerset House holds the evidence. The close is tender because the clothes, the work, and the morning ritual are all asking how a self appears, then partly vanishes.
