Annabel Dover

Flora Alpina is a semi-autobiographical work which examines the life of the artist’s grandmother. Offered a place at Girton College to study Natural Sciences, she was forbidden from accepting by her father who thought a university education would render her unmarriageable.

The blind embossed print on the right details an episode of her life and the mica watercolour painting on the left documents a page of her herbarium. The mica and vegetation used to make the watercolours was collected from Grindelwald, a place the artist’s grandmother visited every year to collect Alpine floral specimens.

Annabel’s PhD research focused on the significance of the female amateur and the overlooked and undervalued natural history collections that were made with love and often tell personal, hidden stories.