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

"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."

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.

Read at Artnet News