Es Devlin Is Creating a Living Portrait of the Entire U.K.

The National Portrait Gallery’s collection contains more than 200,000 artworks, but few depict ordinary people. Es Devlin is creating A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, running through October 27, to include the public in a collective portrait of the nation. The project invites all 69 million U.K. residents to upload a selfie to a dedicated page, where their face morphs into charcoal and chalk markings based on Devlin’s drawings. A framed screen in the History Makers gallery displays results as a continuous stream of everyday British faces. The work is created with Google engineers and technicians who trained an image-generation model on Devlin’s drawings. The project also offers online and onsite drawing classes, encouraging participants to become both portrait and portraitist.

"The artwork is called A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery and has been created in collaboration with engineers and technicians at Google, who trained an image-generation model on Devlin's drawings. Onsite at the London institution's History Makers gallery, a framed screen will show the results of Devlin's tech-enabled handiwork in a ceaseless stream of everyday British faces. Participating is relatively straightforward: people simply upload a selfie to a dedicated page and then watch as their face morphs into the charcoal and chalk markings of a Devlin drawing."

""The National Portrait Gallery is a mirror of us: it reflects who we've been and who we are becoming," Devlin said in a statement. "The collective portrait can hold all of us, together, whatever our backgrounds and beliefs, constantly redrawing itself to include each new participant. It explores national identity as a continuous process of collective imagination.""

"In addition to offering a step-by-step drawing class online, the National Portrait Gallery will be hosting onsite drawing classes through the six-month installation. This project, however, is also calling for people to become portrait and portraitist. At a time when the U.K. is riven with debate over issues such as immigration and national identity, the artwork revisits a subject Devlin centered in 2024's Congregation, in which she displayed portraits of 50 Londoners who had at one time been refugees."

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