Through a variety of media including: painting, photography, video, cyanotype, and drawing, Annabel Dover engages the viewer in untold tales of wonder.

Throughout her practice she constantly finds herself drawn to objects and the invisible stories that surround them. Through their subtle representation she explores their power as intercessionary agents that allow socially acceptable emotional expression. The work presents itself as a complex mixture of scientific observation and tender girlish enthusiasm which often belies their history.

My childhood, whilst seemingly on the surface to be of a functioning middle class family, was spent with parents who indulged in drama and abuse, where the truth was impossible to decipher and where the objects that surrounded my sisters and I were often the only witnesses to ludicrous acts of fantasy and violence. Objects too were central to discovering hidden aspects of people's lives and were clues to their unusual behaviour. For example: the newspaper cutting announcing my birth that alerted me to the fact that I had six sisters and not as I had assumed all of my life, three. The teddy bear that had belonged to a brother I had never met, killed in a car accident in Africa, the car being stripped, his body and the bear's being the only things left intact. The Freemason's case with a bag of unhewn rocks- a sign of dishonour. The naval coat with the buttons ripped off- indicators of an affair that my father had engaged in with a Naval officer. The college gown of my sisters' father, an alcoholic professor. The love letters of his father, Canon for the BBC. The jewellery that represented both my mother's and my grandmother's love affairs. These and many other objects highlighted the traumas, the disjunctures and the breaks in human relationships that made up the atmosphere of my upbringing. The narratives told to me by my family unravelled with the discovery of these indiscreet objects.  

Dover has a thirst for knowledge, knowledge of things and knowledge about people and their lives. Watching, listening and absorbing, her work and life have become a fabulous tangle of information, stories (both real and imagined), images and objects. Her work is part distillation, part peripatetic ramble through her influences which range from archeological illustration, archaic scientific techniques and the enthusiasms of a Victorian lady to the theories of Freud and anthropological research. Speaking of a set of photographs taken in Paris Martha Fleming writes:

Visiting the city, Dover was given a widely varied group of objects domestic and professional by a friend who was renovating a building in which the materials had been left by occupants who had moved on. The dissolution of all personal significance from objects thus abandoned and which still have use and beauty is as if the thread that binds their gathering had anything to the people who had until quite recently owned and kept them. Rendering visible this subtle loss of aura is one of the things Dover explored in a work that is part performance, part document. She took the objects and put them in the street, an act in itself indicative of relinquished ownership. The photographs she then took of the people who sifted through the stuff are witness to the change of meaning that takes place when things change hands. Here Dover is conducting a controlled experiment in which her agency is acknowledged: a drama of abandonment, rescue and pillage transforms the pavement as the objects are summarily tossed from side to side in a catalysis of everyday desire. Something psychologically primordial and yet entirely perfunctory is shown.


Dover was born in Liverpool, Educated in Newcastle and London. She is currently studying for a PHD at Wimbledon exploring a practice lead response to  the cyanotype albums of Anna Atkins. She has shown her work nationally and internationally and her next solo show will be hosted by English Heritage at Darwin's House.

Annabel Dover is represented by Transition Gallery, London