With The National Portrait Gallery’s collection already the largest in the world of its kind, exceeding 200,000 portraits, Es Devlin sets out to expand it to include the entirety of the nation in a single portrait.
Framed on the NPG’s white walls A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery invites all 55 million adults residing in the United Kingdom to have their likeness framed on the white walls alongside the King, Anna Wintour, Deborah Levy, Jane Goodall and Marcus Rashford in the Gallery’s ‘History Makers’ room which adjoins its Main Hall. Training on thousands of Devlin’s drawings, an algorithm engineered by her long term collaborators at Google Arts and Culture will reinterpret each participant’s submission into a digitally rendered chalk and charcoal portrait.
Recalling the enchanted portraits of Hogwarts, Devlin’s portrait of Britain is not fixed in place. Rather, exploiting the possibilities offered by AI, the marks constituting each portrait are drawn on top of the figure behind them. This creates a surprisingly intimate moment of crossover where two strangers’ features — eyes, noses, ears, mouths — overlap and interlay. This process will repeat over the next six months, faces from all across the country surfacing and dissolving into one another.
While some will criticize Devlin’s use of AI as a diminution of manual drawing practice, this technology simultaneously offers the viewer insight into a side of the drawing process which is typically only visible to the artist. In particular, the technology is able to highlight the idea of a drawing as merely a byproduct excreted from the chalk and charcoal during the crucial process of looking. As Victoria Siddal, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, puts it, ‘the project is also a real celebration of drawing, and the act of really looking at another person.’
Devlin will lead a series of drawing workshops at the National Portrait Gallery, and intends to take these workshops alongside the national portrait project to town halls, libraries and schools across the United Kingdom. “I want people who can’t come to the gallery to have the chance to discover drawing and experience being drawn – the process of being seen in a moment of silence without judging or being judged over beliefs and life experiences.” she said. In a cultural moment encumbered by phone addiction, platform-mediated interactions, and broader social atomisation, this sanctification of an ancient human practice grounded in presence for one another feels poignant.
What if actually loving this place on the planet, and the people you happen to be with in this space on the planet could be something like a collective act of imagination?
Amid the ugly debate around immigration and national identity in contemporary Britain, Devlin reaffirms themes from her 2024 project Congregation, in which she drew (in chalk and charcoal) 50 Londoners who had once been refugees.
The National Portrait acts as a gesture of welcome towards refugees and immigrants, rebuking a model of patriotism and national identity that tether themselves to ethnicity; Devlin invites all people in the country, regardless of their citizenship or residency, to submit their likeness. At the Portrait’s launch, in the wake of unprecedented set of local elections which saw a surge in the far-right, Devlin spoke about the importance of telling a different kind of national story and offering a progressive form of patriotism:
“We talk a lot about patriotism and what patriotism can mean, because we often think it means sticking a flag on the front of your head, and meaning something we don’t want it to mean. But what if actually loving this place on the planet, and the people you happen to be with in this space on the planet could be something like a collective act of imagination? An always perpetual fragile act of redrawing ourselves every time someone arrives and leaves? Just like that portrait does. There might be some weird bits when somebody with a beard becomes somebody with their eyebrows done. I’m not saying it will all be lovely. But we’re all going to agree to disagree for a minute and be in one portrait together.”
Through three decades of omnivorous practice, Devlin has proved herself a master of facilitating powerful group experiences. These range from the Olympic Opening Ceremony to the West End’s most acclaimed shows, the concerts of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé to her most recent diptych, Library of Light and Library of Us which create spaces for collective reading.
In this new portrait, Devlin offers up her mastery for crafting emotive group experiences to the entirety of the United Kingdom during a moment of acute national disunity, stating: “We’re at a time where we can constantly talk about what’s wrong, how fragmented, how destructive we are. But how do we resist it? What are the acts of radical resistance that we can come up with as artists? Because if we don’t come up with them, who is going to?”
Homepage image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, inside image triptych image courtesy of Es Devlin Studio, by Daniel Devlin. Portraits can be submitted to website here, A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery. Dates of Drop – In Drawing 12 June, 18:00 – 20:00, 3 July, 18:00 – 20:00 and 4 September, 18:00 – 20:00.
