Richard Lewer | Misadventures: {Suite} Wellington

Misadventures  is an ongoing series of drawings revisiting some of New Zealand's grimmer news stories and moments in history.

The majority of the pen drawings were made at the same time as Lewer's painting series NZ Disasters (2020), which is held in the Auckland Art Gallery collection. Like the subject of true crime itself this series is an ongoing thread through Lewer's practice, unfolding as events take place.

What Lewer finds most interesting is the residue catastrophic events imprint on our sublime landscapes as much as our people. And he has a fascination with the often imprecise and malleable nature of human memory. The pen drawings describe events in hard clear documented recollection, while the charcoal implies a more blurred focus.

Lewer accepts trauma as an inevitable part of a society's psyche: something to be witnessed and worked through. We are all potentially just one-step away from our own misadventure.