Es Devlin’s Mirror Maze At Copeland Park
By Something CuratedCreated in partnership with i-D and Chanel, The Fifth Sense celebrates women across the creative industries, taking the form of a mirror maze installed by Es Devlin in Peckham, nearby the acclaimed stage designer’s studio. Open until 25 September at Copeland Park, the innovative design is the first of a series of “hero” projects championed by the magazine and French fashion house.
Devlin explores an elaborate imagined world played out over several rooms, each created in response to fragrance and exploring the way it can recall memories, times and places unsolicited. The rooms include a large-scale projection which visitors can navigate through, a complex maze of mirrored walls, and immersive graphics to invoke a sensation of physically falling, as well as a scent conceived by Olivier Polge, Chanel’s in-house perfumer, for the installation.
Devlin says, “I wanted to try to make people have that feeling that I have when I open a cupboard door in a strange hotel in Belfast and smell moth balls and plummet – literally no part of the cerebral cortex engaged, pure ancient lizard lymphatic system kicking in – transporting you to how it felt when you smelt that smell when you were a child.”
The first darkened space features a sweeping film projection showing Devlin’s design process. The mirrors and a second film installation surrounded by water within the maze are intended to invoke the sensation of plummeting the designer describes. The final room is lit by red lights and filled with smoke and the scent of the bespoke Chanel perfume created by Polge. The installation will be accompanied by two online films presented by i-D.
Mirror Maze at Copeland Park, SE15 from September 21-25 2016
Images via Victor Frankowski/i-D