Anya Vero - Women Groundbreakers

Hypatia

Oil on silk | approx. 80 x 66 cm | 2020

‘Hypatia’, as we know her, lived so long ago that her history exists only as fragments of hearsay, extracts from momentous written accounts. But more than anything, she is an ideal - that hundreds of years before we began to contemplate women heads of state and gender equality, a talented woman could fight the gender trend and work her way to a position of respect at one of the world’s most prestigious centres of learning: the University of Alexandria. If the accounts of her devoted student, Synesius of Syracuse, are true then she can be credited with developing a more efficient way of doing long division, the invention of the hydrometer, and the development of the astrolabe.

Ada Lovelace

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 54 x 39 cm | 2021

Lovelace is often dubbed the first ‘computer programmer’ for identifying the potential to use numbers to represent broader concepts. She had a name for her style of thinking: poetical science. She believed in the power of intuition and imagination and gave as much importance to them as to the understanding of the calculations themselves. Perhaps the best example of this is music. She suggested that the machine could understand the relationship between different pitched sounds (musical notes) in the same way it understood the relationships between numbers, and thus be programmed to compose pieces of music.

Sofya Kovalevskaya

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 40 x 45 cm | 2022

Kovalevskaya became the first female professor in Northern Europe in 1884 and the first woman to obtain a modern-day doctorate in mathematics. Arguably her most famous intervention involved the discovery of the "Kovalevskaya top"; in (very) simplified terms, it explores the movement of a spinning top by using algebra to predict its motion based on defined criteria including its centre of gravity. Her work thus contributed to the foundation of modern mechanics.

Hilma Af Klint

Oil on silk | approx. 85 x 86 cm | 2021

Af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic widely considered as one of the early pioneers of modern abstract art. Developing alongside her contemporaries, a circle of female artists called “The Five”, she experimented with different ways of painting, including automatic drawing which, as the name suggests, involves taking out the conscious elements of creating a drawing, thus allowing the unconscious mind to channel ideas onto the page.

Marie Curie

Oil on silk | approx. 70 x 88 cm | 2020

Curie was the discoverer of radium and polonium (the latter named for her Polish motherland) and the only person in history to have received Nobel Prizes in two distinct sciences. One of the best examples of someone sacrificing themselves for the sake of her work, she died in Paris in 1934 from aplastic anaemia (thought to result from lifelong exposure to radioactive chemicals), but only after she had changed the face of modern chemistry, coining the term “radioactivity” in the process.

Lise Meitner

Oil on silk | approx. 119 x 117 cm | 2023

A nuclear physicist who explained nuclear fission and co-calculated the amount of energy it produces, Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist and one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917.

Inge Lehmann

Oil on silk | approx. 42 x 35 cm | 2021

For decades, scientists had believed - even in the face of inconsistent calculations based on the vibrations of earthquakes - that the centre of the Earth was molten metal. But Danish seismologist Lehmann examined these inconsistencies and compared where the shock waves passing through the Earth after an earthquake were expected to surface versus their actual locations; from this she theorised that the Earth had an inner core. She built a mathematical model to prove it, overturning decades of scientific opinion. This inner core is a solid ball of metal roughly the size of Pluto.

Grace Hopper

Oil on silk | approx. 90 x 68 cm | 2020

Hopper developed a computer language called COBOL (standing for “COmmon Business-Oriented Language”) that simplified programming and enabled the development of modern day computing. Interestingly, her prime motivation was laziness: a desire to avoid the need for programming computer binary code from scratch and make computing more accessible for all. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark 1 computer and a US Navy rear admiral.

Frida Kahlo

Oil on silk | approx. 80 x 95 cm | 2021

Kahlo’s legacy extends beyond the iconic, arresting self-portraits that made her widely considered to be one of Mexico’s greatest artists of all time. More than just a talented artist, she embodied the ideal of an artist willing to fight through adversity, suffering and misfortune - whether an early contraction of polio, life-changing bus crash injuries, multiple miscarriages, or her tumultuous relationship with her philandering husband. Even after her death in 1954, her work continued to flourish with the rising tide of feminism in the 1970s and her status as a symbol of women’s creativity.

Martha Gellhorn

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 101 x 66 cm | 2022

Gellhorn was a prolific writer and war correspondent. Through her books, most notably The Face of War (1959), she documented numerous conflicts across the world, including the Spanish Civil War, the first war in which civilians were directly affected by the fighting because of the use of civilian bombardment as a military tactic, and conflicts in Indochina and Central America. She was the only woman to land in Normandy on D-Day (by stowing away on a hospital ship) and became one of the most fearless war correspondents of the 20th century, reporting from the front lines with sharp, unfiltered insight.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 82 x 73 cm | 2022

Levi-Montalcini was a neuro-biologist who explored the nature of nerve cells and discovered Nerve-Growth Factor, linked with the brain’s ability to regenerate and create new cells throughout life, earning her and her research partner a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Her work extended beyond science as she served on the Italian Senate until her death aged 103.

Dorothy Hodgkin

Oil on silk | approx. 44 x 44 cm | 2021

You have likely heard of Vitamin B12, an essential vitamin found mostly in meat and other animal based products. And you’ve probably also heard of Penicillin, an antibiotic, formed from mould, that has saved countless lives since it was first discovered in a London hospital in 1928. Now imagine shrinking yourself down to the size of an atom and walking through a city where these molecules are used as houses. In this example, you could say that Dorothy Hodgkin was the woman who discovered the architectural plans for them.

Hedy Lamarr

Oil on silk | approx. 81 x 74 cm | 2020

Not only was Lamarr a famous actor with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and credited with simulating the first on-screen orgasm (in the 1933 Czech film, Ecstasy), she was also a brilliant inventive mind. Along with her friend George Antheil, she developed a frequency-hopping technology for Allied submarines that, while unused in the war, led to the development of modern day WiFi and Bluetooth.

Billie Holiday

Oil on silk | approx. 93 x 84 cm | 2023

Holiday’s hauntingly beautiful voice captured the imagination of generations of jazz fans. After she was broadcast on WABC radio (one of the largest radio networks in New York), recognition of her talent exploded and paved the way for her seminal rendition of ‘Strange Fruit’, first unveiled at the Cafe Society. Her rendition was all the more moving for the song’s imagery and meaning - it was inspired by a poem written by a Jewish teacher about lynching - which reminded Billie of her father’s death.

Gertrude B. Elion

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 48 x 38 cm | 2022

Few people have done more to revolutionise our use and understanding of pharmaceuticals than Gertrude B. Elion. At the time she began her research, drugs and treatments were generally devised through a painstaking process of trial and error. She explored ‘Rational Drug Design’, a way of creating drugs that copied natural compounds that would trick cancer cells into self-destructing without affecting the healthy cells, thus playing a key part in developing a drug called AZT, one of the widest used in the first waves of the AIDS epidemic.

Katherine Johnson

Oil on silk | approx. 48 x 35 cm | 2020

Johnson has been dubbed a “human computer” for her genius in calculating space flight trajectories. In 1962, as the US prepared for the astronaut John Glenn to take their first orbital flight, Glenn personally requested that Johnson double check the maths as a condition of embarking on the flight rather than relying on their relatively untested IBM system. Then, in 1969, Johnson calculated the precise trajectories for Apollo 11 to land on the moon in one of humanity’s greatest collective achievements.

Rosalind Franklin

Oil on silk | approx. 78 x 67 cm | 2020

In May 1952 Franklin took the famous high resolution Photograph 51 using a technique called x-ray crystallography. For the first time ever, it revealed the molecular structure of DNA. She unveiled her findings at a talk in London, attended by James Watson who, along with Francis Crick and her former colleague Maurice Wilkins, later won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA. Franklin’s exclusion from the prize has been the subject of much debate around women’s lack of equal recognition in the sciences.

Marie Van Brittan Brown

Oil on silk | approx. 45 x 42 cm | 2021

Anxious about the high incidence of crime in her neighbourhood in Queens, New York, Van Brittan Brown devised the first prototype for CCTV, by cutting peepholes of different heights in her front door, setting up a camera that could move between them, and linking the camera feed to any screen in her house before adding a two-way microphone system. On 1 August 1966 she put in her patent application based on her new designs and was rewarded with a feature in the New York Times four days later. To improve the response time for police, she later added a feature that could call emergency services at the press of a button.

Stephanie Kwolek

Oil on silk | approx. 99 x 72 cm | 2020

It’s hard to quantify just how many lives have been saved and injuries prevented by high-strength industrial fibres. In 1965, Kwolek’s extraordinary hard work paid her back with the serendipitous discovery of a new type of material, whose simultaneous strength, lightness and stiffness gave it boundless possibilities for use in a range of products that would transform industries and improve countless lives. You may well have heard of the most famous of them – Kevlar® – for its use in bulletproof vests, helmets, fighter jets, Formula 1 cars, fireproof suits, tyres and many other products.

Maya Angelou

Oil on silk | approx. 95 x 82 cm | 2020

Few people did as much to support the Civil Rights Movement and lives of 20th Century Black Americans as Maya Angelou. In a prolific career of writing and poetry that spanned over 50 years, she wrote seven autobiographies, a stream of books, poems, TV shows, plays and films, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie, won three Grammys for various spoken word albums, and was invited by Bill Clinton to recite one of her poems at his inauguration.

Anne Frank

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 53 x 53 cm | 2022

Anne Frank is one of the world’s most famous diarists, earning her the worldwide recognition as a writer that she dreamed about as she wrote her heart wrenching account of her time spent in hiding during the Holocaust. The Diary of a Young Girl is a stunning juxtaposition of external and internal struggle, as we see the geopolitical horrors of World War II through the adolescent eyes of a woman coming to terms with puberty and the weight of expectation of her family and co-habitants, trying to understand herself even as the world crumbles around her. While she perished, her legacy and work lives on and touches the hearts of millions of people.

Yayoi Kusama

Oil and mixed media on silk | approx. 90 x 68 cm | 2021

Immersing yourself in the world of Yayoi Kusama feels like being dropped into a fairytale, with whimsical patterns and shapes, bright colours that trigger happy emotions, giving us a sense of adventure, awakening our imagination. However, once you look closer and examine the nature of those shapes, or the meaning of the colour, or an almost hysterical and soothing succession of patterns, you realise that there is more to this than meets the eye. There is struggle in this work. Deep inner struggle with the demons that began haunting the artist from childhood and grew into horrible beasts by the time she reached adulthood.

Tu Youyou

Oil and mixed media on silk | approx. 87 x 72 cm | 2021

Inspired by a passage of ancient Chinese literature (from which her name, coincidentally, was taken), Youyou isolated the active ingredient of sweet wormwood, now known as ‘artemisinin’, to develop a cure for malaria that saves millions of lives every year. She and her team won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015, showing the value in preserving the old for the sake of the new.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Oil on silk | approx. 85 x 73 cm | 2022

Ginsburg was a progressive Supreme Court justice and liberal champion who shaped the lives of millions of Americans. Throughout her career, she battled against gender discrimination, even having to hide a pregnancy during her tenancy as assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Law for fear they would terminate her contract. She is particularly well known for her impassioned dissenting opinions in a pair of 2007 decisions: Gonzales v. Carhart, where the court split 5-4 in upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act; and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, where the court ruled that a woman couldn’t bring a federal claim against her employer for having been paid less than her male counterparts.

Jane Goodall

Oil on silk | approx. 95 x 89 cm | 2021

Goodall is famously the first human to have been accepted into a chimpanzee society. During her research in Tanganyika, East Africa, she observed various behaviours thought only to be shown by humans, including laughing, kissing, hugging, and tool making. In 1977 she established the Jane Goodall Institute for the protection of chimpanzees and their habitats, which propagated the foundation of many other smaller organisations.

Lynn Conway

Oil on silk | approx. 48 x 49 cm | 2022

Conway was a remarkable talent and a pioneer in computer science in her own right; whilst with IBM she was hired to work on a team of computer scientists tasked with building a supercomputer, on a project called “Advanced Computing Systems” which paved the way for technology used in modern day computer chips and microprocessors. But her professional achievements are all the more impressive when considered in the context of her battle with gender dysphoria and her fight to gain proper recognition and equal treatment for transgender people in science.

Patricia Bath

Oil on silk | approx. 77 x 69 cm | 2020

Bath developed a treatment for cataracts using laser technology that has lifted thousands of people out of blindness and became the first African American woman to be awarded a patent for a medical invention. Her life’s work was inspired by her observations interning at Harlem Hospital, showing a higher rate of blindness among the black community, and in particular the extremely high rate of glaucoma.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Oil on silk | approx. 39 x 36 cm | 2021

A ‘radio pulsar’ is a type of star; very small, very dense, and rapidly rotating in such a way that pulses of light signals can be detected as far away as Earth. Bell Burnell was the first to notice these signals: on data captured on a radio telescope she helped design and build in 1967. Her supervisor had suggested the signals were only the result of interference by near objects - radios on Earth or orbiting satellites. But this explanation was quickly proved wrong because the signals always appeared in the same place in the night sky. She and the team went on to discover a second pulsar and earned a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 (though controversially Bell Burnell was not a named recipient herself).

Flossie Wong-Staal

Oil on silk | approx. 39 x 47 cm | 2020

Flossie Wong-Staal was a molecular virologist who saved countless lives through her dedication to research in the field of HIV studies and other viruses. She and her team provided the molecular evidence for HIV, becoming the first to clone it and making other significant discoveries, thus taking a huge leap in understanding HIV and finding treatments for it.

Marina Abramovic

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 68 x 89 cm | 2021

The simplicity of Abramović’s performance art is one of its most disarming qualities. Her most famous works include: The Artist Is Present (2010) in which she spent two and a half months in the New York Museum of Modern Art and invited visitors to sit in front of her, sitting across from 1,545 different people and Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she placed 72 objects on a table - ranging from honey and olive oil to a whip, thorns, a gun and bullet - and invited audience members to do whatever they wanted to her using them.

Ann Tsukamoto

Oil on silk | approx. 42 x 38 cm | 2020

Tsukamoto is one of the pioneers at the front of the stem cell revolution. Her work touches, no less, one of humanity’s loftiest ambitions: finding a cure for cancer. An American scientist and researcher, she has worked with a gene called ‘WNT-1’ to develop what’s known as a “transgenic” representation of breast cancer. In layperson’s terms, this involves the natural transfer of a gene from one organism to a different one (usually, a mouse), resulting in change in the observable characteristics of that organism, allowing for examination and further study of how cancer works.

Natalija Aleksandrova

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 98 x 85 cm | 2022

This painting of the artist’s mother is a tribute to all mothers and women throughout the world.

Malala Yousafzai

Oil on silk / faux silk | approx. 76 x 83 cm | 2022

For Yousafzai, the idea of ‘taking a bullet’ wasn’t simply rhetorical, some thought experiment around willingness and sacrifice. She champions education for all women in Pakistan and worldwide and her journalism and activism, even after nearly dying from a bullet to the head aged only 15, has led to her becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate in history at 17.