"The harder it is to work on a surface, the more I'm attracted to it," says Lewer, whose diverse variety of painterly grounds has included venetian blinds, pegboard, formica, sandpaper, billiard table felt and perspex. For Lewer, the surface dictates how a painting is made: "it sets its own direction".

Lewer's work explores the facets of society that are unsolved, ambivalent, newsworthy, religious, ill, moral or amoral, or even criminal. His fascination with crime and mystery began in 2004 when he listened in to the Wanganui Police Radio frequency for three months, producing fast, harsh drawings like ciphers for the ordered violence of drug-busts, assaults and break-ins. Since 2005 his paintings and drawings have explored unsolved cases of missing people and unexplained, suspicious disappearances. A nine-month residency at Melbourne's St Vincent hospital produced a series of monochromatic renderings of sickness, instutionalised rooms and the nuns of St Vincent who ran the hospital from 1893 to the 1970s.

Lewer is also interested in sport; his 2006 installation Skill Discipline Training evoked the physicality of sport but also its lexicon, its status in culture and society striated by notions of winning and losing, success and failure. Most recently, Lewer has completed a series on pegboard entitled Confessions. Sam Leach writes that Lewer's drawing "has a folkloric quality"; Lewer's contemporary lore is half mythical and half anthropological, retelling the stories whose events we know objectively and dispassionately in a way that, without moralising, imbues them with a compelling yet opaque significance.