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Can a unified image of Britain unite a country that feels divided? This is the underlying hope of Es Devlin’s new installation at the National Portrait Gallery: a living portrait of not royalty, politicians or celebrities but thousands of ordinary faces slowly moving in and out.
Developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, National Portrait Gallery is inviting people in the UK to submit a selfie, which is transformed into a portrait drawn in Devlin’s style of charcoal smoke and chalk before joining the series of images that tend to evolve and rotate.
The effect is surprisingly intimate: the faces look briefly at the surface before disappearing again; strangers have become strangers; top view is broken. Watching feels more like looking at pictures than catching pieces of people as they pass through a crowd.
For Devlin, an artist best known for creating dreamlike scenes for Beyoncé, Adele is the ultimate ritual London The Olympics, the work comes at a time when Britain is feeling increasingly affected by political anger, algorithmic confusion and loneliness.
He said: “I don’t want to end the differences or think that everyone should agree. But I believe that if we can spend some time together without saying a word, maybe we can agree that we can all be together.”
The placement is intentionally imperfect: the faces don’t quite blend into each other but collide with the jar before they separate again.
“There will be moments in a composite image where one face connects to another and it looks bad; where the beard connects to the female face in a weird way before it’s gone,” Devlin said. But I think that this point is true when you say that we cannot cross our borders.
The project has taken three years to build. Working with engineers and experts at Google, Devlin taught a photo-processing model to his hand-drawn images so that his participants’ selfies could be translated into something closer to a painting than a digital photograph.
The agreement, however, sits amid another major controversy: that at a time when artists around the world are struggling to use their work to train AI systems, Devlin willingly surrendered his “shadow” art to a tech company.
“I am well aware that my shadow – and the shadow of many other artists – is being placed in the work of the capitalist system to make a few people very rich,” he said.
However, Devlin says the project is not designed as a volunteer effort but rather as a recycling project. “I want to take technologies and do what Wendy did for Peter Pan: I want to dance with my shadow in opposition. This is also using technologies that are being used to separate us, to confuse us.”
Outside the theaters, Britain can be heard loud and divided: people sealed inside their food, constant conflicts, public life that takes place in times of crisis. Devlin’s answers are unexpectedly analogue in spirit. He doesn’t talk about technology but about curiosity; of what is increasingly becoming quiet with another person – and looking at them.
“We are in a time of destruction, division, separation, isolation,” he said. “I want to reject this. I want to ask people to think of ways to avoid disruption and instead to think of the world as a way of constant change.”
The project also reflects his attempt to open the doors of an organization that, he admits, can feel overwhelming. Along with the installation, Devlin will lead free photography workshops at the gallery, while online classes will allow people to participate from anywhere in the country.
They hope to eventually take the whole picture and the recordings into town halls, libraries and schools around the UK. “I want people who can’t come to the museum to have access to the paintings and events that are being recorded – a way to see a moment of silence without judging or being judged for beliefs and events in life,” he said.
Among the first to submit a photo was Ravinder Tagarh, a 26-year-old security guard who arrived in the UK in 2023 to study. Although he is grateful for Britain, he said that the past few years have often been lonely and that “people are not very friendly”.
Seeing his face reflected on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery had a bigger impact on him than he expected. “It really touched me to have my picture on the wall of a place like the National Portrait Gallery, next to the king and queen – with Harry Styles and Marcus Rashford,” he said.
“It felt good to be seen – to think that someone would recognize me, a security guard, because they saw my picture up there. It made me feel part of this world and not a stranger.”
Then he paused. “It gave me hope.”
