Annabel Dover was born in Liverpool in 1975, she studied Fine Art BA(Hons) at Newcastle University, MA at Central St Martin’s (UAL), PGCE at Cambridge University. Her PhD research at Chelsea College of Art (UAL) focussed on the cyanotype albums of Anna Atkins. Through original research Dover discovered that Atkins donated photograms of doctored, fictionalised botanical plant specimens to scientific institutions such as The Linnean Society and The Royal Society.
Dover’s painting Museum of my Mother Kate (2024) was recently acquired by the Foundling Museum. The painting was commissioned for the exhibition Finding Family (Foundling Museum, 2024) and depicts the objects the artist found in her mother’s drawers, after her death. In 2012 the Imperial War Museum acquired a series of Dover’s cyanotypes which featured in the shows: Contemporary Art from the IWM: Art in a Media Age, Imperial War Museum, North (2013), Loss, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2013) and the books: Art from Contemporary Conflict, (2015), Sara Bevan, and Blue Mythologies, (2019), Professor Carol Mavor.
Throughout Dover’s practice she finds herself drawn to objects and the invisible stories that surround them. Through a variety of media including painting, photography, video, cyanotype, drawing and writing, she engages the viewer in untold tales of wonder. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and the work presents itself as a complex mixture of scientific observation and tender girlish enthusiasm.
Her book Florilegia (2021) is part distillation, part peripatetic ramble through her influences which range from archaeological illustration, archaic scientific techniques and the enthusiasms of a Victorian lady to the theories of Bachelard and anthropological research. She recently co-authored the chapter: Chapter I, Interior Archives, An Experiment in Autobiographical Fiction, in The Handbook of research on the relationship between autobiographical memory and photography (2023) and she is interested in the methodologies of close-reading, narrative and storytelling to create new and original research.
