Annabel Dover's work has an instant appeal. Her paintings are like sweets; candy coloured and delicious and her subject matter dances around the irresistible subjects of remembering, longing and recreating. For her one-a-day series she made a small oil-on-board painting everyday for a year. Each painting was of something that grabbed her attention on that day and ranged from alpine views to Easter eggs to slightly sinister babies. The completed series had the quality of a very personal scrapbook, each trinket and memory exquisitely rendered with spare, painterly strokes. Her more recent work deals with the unusual subject of Psychometry, focusing on objects that have a particular connection to their owners. These often mundane and care-worn objects are then recorded in meticulously detailed coloured drawings which like much of Dover's work have a curious uncanny nostalgic quality to them.
Cathy Lomax 2009
Annabel Dover's 'Oriole' is a wonderful confection that is like a Henri Rousseau as sculpture wrought from Willy Wonka's factory.
Andrew Mania 2009
I love Annabel Dover's work; it is whittled down to beautiful
simplicity, gentle, and quietly confident.
Stella Vine 2009
It is a thread we can see Dover following in other works which relate more to the tenuous nature of meaning that links people to the objects they collect, and which can so easily be unravelled. More Levi-Strauss than Susan Stewart, Dover's work in this regard is a kind of anthropology of intimacy. In one photo-documentary work, she catalogues with a strict and strangely framed set of almost-snaps the belongings of an elderly friend who is blind. It is difficult to tell in these eerie pictures whether the aesthetic is 'of the objects' or 'of the images'. The photographs themselves seem to have aged: as if in aspic, the yellowing of all that can no longer see the objects which she is photographing, Dover is somehow corroborating for her friend that these things do still exist, and are still bound to her friend's heart. It is an act of love, but it is also a forensic investigation.
This work is directly related to another set of photographs taken in Paris--for she is also semi-nomadic. 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.
Dr. Martha Fleming NESTA fellow 2009