Alice Anderson / Kirsty Buchanan / Annabel Dover / Georgie Flood / Andrea Hannon / Paul Kindersley / Hayley Lock / Cathy Lomax /
Alli Sharma / Corinna Spencer / Mark Scott Wood / Jessica Voorsanger

4 - 27 May 2012

 

ANNABEL DOVER


Annabel Dover's Tainted Love hero is Anna Atkins, a Victorian botanist and devoted daughter of the scientist JG Children. Atkins made over 200 drawings for her fathers translation of Lamarck's Genera of Shells and went on to use the Cyanotype method she had learnt from royal astronomer Thomas Herschel to document the flora of her native Kent. Unfortunately Atkins work like that of so many Victorian women was undervalued in favour of a male relative. Atkins' albums of cyanotypes are charming, illogical and poetic, yet she is remembered as an assistant scientist rather than an artist. For Tainted Love Dover has painted images from Roger Phillips Wild Flowers of Britain (1977), which sought to rekindle the botanical zealotry of Victorian naturalists. The paintings capture the domestic and amateur look of the photographs; some of the plants look half dead and picked and are displayed in an illogical and unscientific way.

Annabel Dover studied at Central St Martins College of Art, London and lives and works in Ipswich. Previous exhibitions include National Velvet Transition Gallery, London; The Island of True Stories, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter; Lux, Rosy Wilde, London; Trace & Nostalgia, Persimmon Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.

Tainted Love is travelling to...
Meter Room, Coventry, 8 June - 8 July 2012
Down Stairs at Great Brampton House, Herefordshire, 30 Sep - 18 Nov 2012

 

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