Table of Contents
Richard Lewer's 'Steve' began with a conversation at the end of a normal day. Lewer was running a boxing gym in Melbourne's north when Peter Rollis, while helping him clean up, began talking about his father. Steve Rollis had Alzheimer's disease, and his family was learning what it meant to watch someone they knew immediately become increasingly unfamiliar to himself.
A decade later, that conversation sparked the creation of one of Lewer's most personal works. After entering the National Gallery of Australia's collection in 2024 and being exhibited in Canberra, Steve has begun a three-year national tour, taking one family's experience of dementia to seven regional galleries across Australia.
At its centre is an animated film constructed through thousands of paintings, photographs, and Super 8 footage. Peter and his mother Christina narrate Steve's story, tracing the gradual progression of his illness alongside memories of the life that preceded it. Steve migrated to Australia from Greece in 1955, built a life in Melbourne with Christina, and raised three children. There were family dinners, children, and eventually grandchildren. Then came the smaller signs of change: forgetfulness, difficulty with directions, and withdrawing from weekly dinners. Later, he could no longer feed or shower himself, or reliably recognise the people caring for him.
Lewer does not soften these realities, but neither does he allow them to consume Steve's identity. The distinction gives the work much of its emotional force. Dementia may shape the final chapter of Steve's life, but Steve remains a portrait of an entire person and the family that continues to remember him when he can no longer remember them.
The surface on which Lewer tells this story is equally important. He sourced old Formica and Laminex tablets, many already stained and marked by previous lives, and painted directly onto them. Images were painted, photographed, and replaces as Lewer painstakingly built the stop-motion animation. The process has an affinity with the instability of memory without becoming a neat visual metaphor for dementia. Images disappear, others take their place, yet traces and the surface beneath them remain.
The choice of a table also keeps Steve firmly within the domestic world. These are surfaces associated with meals, bills, conversations, celebrations, and difficult family decisions. Dementia is often discussed through medical statistics and the language of diagnosis, but its consequences unfold in these ordinary spaces. Christina initially understood Steve's forgetfulness as part of aging. As his condition progressed, care became increasingly intimate, and grief began while he was still alive.
There is considerable responsibility involved in turning experiences like these into an artwork, particularly when they belong to another family. Lewer is not the person who lived Steve's illness most closely. Steve acknowledges that distance by allowing Peter and Christina to remain central to its telling. Their voices accompany Lewer's images rather than being replaced by his interpretation of them. What emerges is less an artist speaking on behalf of a family than an artist giving physical form to memories they have entrusted to him.
Fourteen additional tabletop paintings shift the perspective again. Here, Lewer turns towards his own life: his first car, his family cat Toffee, a trip with art-school friends, and his father in hospital. Beside the profound losses experienced by the Rollis family, these recollections can initially appear almost inconsequential. Their ordinariness is precisely what gives them weight. A life is not remembered only through its milestones. It survives in stray images, objects, places, and moments whose significance may only become clear when the ability to recall them is threatened.
That idea becomes especially important as Steve leaves the National Gallery and travels around Australia. Dementia is now Australia's leading cause of death, and the exhibition will be accompanied by programs designed to build regional galleries' capacity to work with people living with dementia and their carers. Entry will also remain free throughout the tour.
This gives Steve a purpose beyond representation. A story once shared while two people cleaned a boxing gym will now be encountered in communities across the country, many by visitors who know some version of it already. Lewer cannot restore what dementia took from Steve, nor does the work pretend that art can resolve the realities of the disease. What it can do is preserve the shape of ones life and the people who surround it.
For a work about forgetting, Steve is ultimately an extraordinary act of remembering.
