Paula Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935. As a child, she grew up under the fascist regime of António de Oliveria Salazar. Raised by resolutely anti-fascist parents, Rego went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she began an artistic practice set upon highlighting the injustices of the Salazar regime, and those suffered by women in particular.

Rego's 1987 painting, 'The Policeman's Daughter', deals symbolically with these themes of oppression. In it, a strong woman, dressed in white, is depicted polishing the black boot of a policeman - presumably her father's. Her possession of the boot, however, and her penetration of it, perhaps suggests an inversion of the dynamic of power between the masculinist symbol of the state and the lone woman.

'The Policeman's Daughter' is reworked here in 'The Internet's Daughter', wherein the black boot is replaced with a laptop. Through this substitution, it asks how power might operate in art today, but also, how it might be resisted.