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

Of the more than 200,000 artworks in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, few depict ordinary people. The British artist Es Devlin is addressing the oversight.

In a project set to run through October 27, the set designer and contemporary artist is inviting all 69 million U.K. residents to take part in a collective portrait of the nation. 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.

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.

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.

Composite image of portraits from A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery by Es Devlin. Photo: courtesy Es Devlin Studio.

“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.”

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. This project, however, is also calling for people to become portrait and portraitist. 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.

Devlin drawing at the National Portrait Gallery. Photo: courtesy PQ Neiman, National Portrait Gallery.

“Audiences will be able to not only observe but become part of this portrait itself, pushing the boundaries of portraiture, as well as joining drawing workshops to explore their own drawing style,” Flavia Frigeri, the collections director at the National Portrait Gallery, said in a statement.

Although Devlin first gained prominence as a trailblazing designer of West End plays and the concert backdrop for pop star concerts, recent years have seen her increasingly lean into the world of fine art. She was among the first artists invited to stage work at Superblue Miami, the immersive art center, received her first museum show at New York’s Cooper Hewitt in 2023, and installed a 20-foot rotating library at Miami Art Week last year.