This artist book was published by Aitche Books on the occasion of the exhibition, What the Roof Dreamt by Denis O’Connor at Two Rooms 18 April - 19 May 2007 with the support of the Burr Foundation and the Richard and Nicoll Trust, London.

The exhibition comprised of found texts and images recorded in O’Connor’s notebooks over four decades of travels engraved onto slate roof tiles and this publication features every single artwork alongside the artist’s sketchbook notes and drawings. The rooftop is one of the most significant loci within O’Connor’s personal archive of ‘memory places’. It is point both of departure and return, a transitional, liminal site that O’Connor associates with childhood and the generative capacity of the imagination. The book itself is an artwork which, in its complex interweaving of personal memory and cultural history, and its conflation of the symbolic properties of materials with the heraldic qualities of images, might function as a legend to a map of O’Connor’s artistic practice.

The artworks have been photographed for the publication by Ken Downie, Fiona Pardington, Tomas Tengblad, Dara McGrath and Denis O’Connor.

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