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Excerpts from catalogue essay It’s getting better all the time by Emma Bugden:
[Richard Lewer] is an artist whose source material has ranged from horror movies to crime scenes. A residency at Melbourne’s St Vincent hospital – a repository for some of the most extreme physical and emotional pain one is ever likely to experience, therefore seems an apt environment for Lewer. Described by the artist as ‘a mysterious place that never closes’ the hospital is the site where, as Foucault reminds us, we both enter and exit this world...
Lewer claims that one of the first thing that came to mind when he moved into the hospital was Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom and his graphite drawings adroitly conjure up the slow, alluring terror of the series. Get Well, Lewer’s body of work produced as a result of the residency, suggests both a command and a plea, the desperate optimism of a thousand greeting cards. The hospital of Lewer’s works is littered with ghosts and shadows, mysterious shapes which loom ominously beside patients beds and sneak up behind them unseen. Nightgowns become ghostly white sheets, doorways are black chasms.
Allongside the intensity of these works sit companion pieces, depictions of the nuns of St Vincent, who were the original nurses and managers when the religious hospital was founded by the Sisters of Charity in 1893. The hospital's historian Bryan Egan optimistically declares: 'the sisters founded better than they knew, governed more sternly than they believed and guided more kindly than they hoped’. Richard Lewer’s portraits of the nuns are rendered with quiet simplicity; punctuating the exhibition like a moral compass.
Of these works Lewer says: 'the nun portraits are as integral to the narrative drawings as the sisters themselves are to the history and function of the hospital: an omniscient presence, both benevolent and forbidding'.
Richard Lewer’s Get Well series tackles our deepest fear—death—and finds it both scary and yet inordinately touching. Pain and fear lace the work, but it’s a world into which we all must inevitably enter at some point despite ourselves. As Lewer says: ‘sickness is the commonality. It reveals the fragility and vulnerability of the human race’.
Emma Bugden
Curator - Te Tuhi, The Mark. Auckland
Catalogues are available from the gallery.
Please click here for NZ Herald review
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