Henrietta Vansittart (1833-1883) was a pioneering inventor and engineer who improved her father’s design of a screw propeller for steam ships.

Her re-imagined portrait is built from three main elements:

- the archive patent document with her drawings of the new screw propeller design

- a photo from the Science Museum Collection of a wooden model she made in 1869 © Science Museum Group.

- the original portrait of her from the front of a publication called The History of the Lowe Vansittart Propeller

There was something powerful about being able to connect her in this image with her development models that she used to keep around her house. I wanted to visually play with the size of the models and the scale of the final propellers that would have been fitted to ships. I like the way the large propeller appears to wrap around her, and the way the textures from her original image responded to digital warping to suggest flow and waves.

Unusually, next to the other women in this series, I think she commissioned the original portrait herself - so with more agency over it she seems to be holding a bit more interest and power for herself than other female scientists of a similar period. I still hope she might appreciate this re-imagining of her portrait..