The woman behind WHIPS
Anna Dowling-Clarke is an art historian, storyteller, and founder of WHIPS: Women Hidden in Plain Sight — a platform that brings visibility to the overlooked achievements of women through immersive self-guided audio tours, in-person walks, and public talks. Her work invites audiences to see familiar places through a radically different lens: one that honours the women whose lives, labour and legacies have been forgotten, ignored, or erased from the built environment and the historical record.
With a background in art history and a particular interest in female patrons of the arts, Anna’s research explores how women shaped cultural life, often behind the scenes or against the odds. She is drawn not only to what stories get told, but how they are told: what details are emphasised, which voices are omitted and who gets to author the narrative.
WHIPS is rooted in a deep belief in the power of place-based storytelling to challenge inherited histories. From royal palaces to overlooked alleyways, Anna uses the city as a stage to spotlight trailblazers, rule-breakers and everyday women whose impact has long been hidden in plain sight.
Why I created WHIPS
“This project started from a quiet frustration. While studying for my master’s degree in Art History, I spent a lot of time researching the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. I was drawn to her boldness, her perspective and the way she insisted on being seen. But as I dug deeper, I realised how little I actually knew about women artists more broadly, and how rarely they were mentioned throughout the rest of my education.
Thanks to the work of a range of scholars, including the brilliant, accessibility-focused art historian Katy Hessel, I began to uncover more of the women left out of art history. But my curiosity began to shift. I wasn’t only interested in the artists themselves, I became fascinated by the women who supported the arts. Who were the women behind the scenes—the patrons, the funders, the collectors—who had the means and the vision to make space for creativity?
That’s what led me to Florence, where I spent time at the Dutch Insitute for Art History researching the women who appear in the payment records of the painter Alessandro Allori. It was there that I met Martine Bontjes, founder of Women of Amsterdam, and someone who shared my growing passion for tracing the impact of women in cultural life. Our conversations have never really stopped.
These tours are part of that conversation. It’s a way of bringing those stories into the open air, into the streets of Edinburgh, where so many women lived, created, fought, healed and endured. I hope they make you feel curious, moved and even a little changed because once you start to notice the women in the margins, you can’t unsee them, and the city begins to look very different.”
Anna Dowling-Clarke
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