KEY POINTS:
What: Exhibition - What the Roof Dreamt, by Denis O'Connor
Where and when: Two Rooms Gallery, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to May 19
Denis O'Connor's first job when he left school at 15 was at the former George Courts department store on Karangahape Rd, where every summer the Ridgeway Circus would set up on the roof.
"One of my tasks was to help Charlie Ridgeway get the baby elephant from the basement to the roof in the goods lift," O'Connor says.
"The lift had no roof, so you used to look up at these receding numerals and these greasy cables, with dust clinging to everything like a membrane, and I'd help Charlie guide this elephant into this tiny lift. I'd close the concertina doors and the whole lift would start trembling and the elephant would go up to the rooftop.
"The elephant was the starring attraction of this grimy little circus. They'd put on Chubby Checker's Do the Twist, and the elephant would move its hips slightly to the record.
"I would stand at the bottom of the lift well and listen to the kids screaming, and I would know the elephant was doing its twist."
That memory is the genesis of the work The Twist in K Road, the last of 30 carved slate roof tiles in O'Connor's first Auckland dealer show in seven years.
"Behind each work there are stories that may be allegories about memory, they may be fables, but each slate has a task to do with my experiences coded into it," O'Connor says.
The Two Rooms show includes three distinct series, tied together with the notion of dreams or dreaming.
The first, a four-part work called The Quartermaster's Dream, is "very exotic, very baroque", O'Connor says.
"It's all about the imaginative life of childhood, and it is strongly attuned to my own children's childhood. That starts the journey."
Onyx from Pakistan and Persia, obsidian, a child's wheelchair gilded in 23 carat gold and hung from the ceiling like a chandelier, a crystal globe blown for O'Connor by the Waterford factory in Ireland - there is a rich variety of surface and sensation.
"I am locating this project in the imaginative world, and the journey starts with taking a deep dive into memory and asking questions about the experience of travel," he says.
The second series is Rathcoola Dreaming, three large photographs O'Connor created in collaboration with Irish photographer Dana McGrath while he was in Ireland in 2005 on a seven-month residency.
"While I was in Ireland I met Paul Muldoon, a poet I have been reading for 25 years. That took me back to one of the first things by him I read, Why Brownlee Left, a simple but enigmatic poem about a farmer who disappeared from a field he was ploughing and was never seen again.
"So I took Brownlee out of the poem and did a job on him. I brought him to New Zealand and had him working on a roading gang in Auckland, then sent him down the Whanganui River, then he abandoned New Zealand and went back to his home country."
The photos were taken over three seasons on the estate O'Connor stayed on. "They are big and theatrical and operatic and I made the props, I found the locations and I chose the actors, so essentially they are like film stills.
"I wanted to explore the territory I had gone over in earlier work on Irish immigration to the South Pacific, but in a different discipline."
Adding a touch of Polynesia to the photos is the presence of two Rarotongan boys living on the estate.
Muldoon is booked for next year's Wellington writers' festival.
The third series, What the Roof Dreamt, is 30 pieces of Welsh Ffestiniog slate
"Each slate work is based on an incident, an encounter or a place, quite often far removed from this country.
"The exploration of a particular moment, place or time triggers off a whole lot of connecting layers or threads."
O'Connor is interested in the way things that strike the traveller may be some mundane detail or texture which makes them recognise something deeply buried in the early memories.
"I have notebooks which I have been carrying round the world for four decades, so what I see on the ground at the moment is recorded. That is the genesis for the works."
On the reverse of the slates is what O'Connor calls the provenance texts, giving some of the sources for the images and text on the front.
"It is uncharacteristic for artists to share the provenance of their image-making, but for years that has been an important part of my practice."
Rather than putting his work in an art historical framework, O'Connor looks for cues in contemporary writing. What the Roof Dreamt was inspired by novelist W.G. Max Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001.
"His work was essentially about travel in the sense I am trying to bring to this project, not just what we see in front of us as we travel, but what we bring to it."
