The Thomas farm at Mercer

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Richard Lewer’s fascination with the struggles of living has become the central subject in his work. Referring to himself as a contemporary social realist, he delves into crime, sports, religion and family, working with multiple media and techniques including drawing, animation, performance and painting. The Thomas farm at Mercer is part of a series of eleven works painted on used pool-table baize that focus on crime stories and sports; it is one of four depicting unsolved crimes from New Zealand. The 1970 murders of Jeannette and Harvey Crewe are the subject of The Thomas farm. In what remains one of New Zealand’s most infamous unsolved murders, Waikato farmer Arthur Allan Thomas was twice convicted of murdering the Crewes then in 1979 pardoned, after it was proved that the police had planted incriminating evidence. Lewer, who grew up in Hamilton, remembers driving past the Thomas farm as a child and being captivated by the story.

Lewer often uses unconventional materials. His decision to work on pool-table baize came after reading about the California serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was known as the Night Stalker. Ramirez had implicated himself by bragging about his actions while playing pool. Lewer was attracted to the idea that pool-table surfaces are witness to many conversations; their stains of cigarette ash and beer are literally marks of stories told over the table. Referring to the baize as skin, he takes an investigative approach, ‘mapping out the stories on the table’.1

This technique is evident in The Thomas farm, which lays out images of key elements related to the case: the Crewe and Thomas houses, a floor plan of the Crewe house, a rifle, cartridge, trailer and axle and the surviving Rochelle Crewe’s baby cot, creating a storyboard effect. The compartmentalised surface, locations and evidence are depicted at different scales and floating in space. Their unanchored positions and mixed scale, viewpoints and perspectives — seen in the bird’s-eye view of the floor plan, the frontal depiction of the houses and the not-to-scale representations of the rifle, trailer and axle — echo the unresolved nature of the case.

Charlotte Huddleston

1 Richard Lewer, correspondence with Charlotte Huddleston, 12 October 2017.