From street to gallery, globetrotter Stormie Mill's art comes full circle

Perth street artist Stormie Mills returns from Venice with state gallery exhibition When Stormie Mills was a teenager starting out in the world of street art, he wondered how artists got their work into the Art Gallery of WA. Forty years later, the state gallery has given him a solo exhibition. His exhibition, All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains, brings together a body of work, including two 12-metre-long paintings and a piece painted directly onto the gallery floor, which visitors will be invited to walk on. Mills, who now lives in Venice, said creating the exhibition was a beautiful way to return to his hometown. "It's an honour and a privilege," he said. "In my early 20s, I remember coming into the art gallery, and I remember speaking to people at the Friends of the Art Gallery in particular about how you get in here — I had no idea of how you would be exhibited. "I was thinking like you'd bring a painting in and then hang it on the wall, so to be welcomed with such open arms and to have my ideas nurtured and to be able to do something quite so ambitious is amazing." Born in the UK, Mills migrated to Perth with his family as a child, then moved back to Wales in his teens, where he first discovered street art. Over the past 40 years, his distinctive monochrome paintings on walls and buildings have made him a well-known figure in the Perth art scene, but he said he never consciously set out to have that career. "I've always drawn, so I'm not so sure that I had so much of an artistic career; I try to think of it as an artistic life. "As a child, I drew; that was really what I was interested in and then in the 80s I discovered graffiti as the backdrop to a lot of movies and video clips "There wasn't anybody to teach me any of this, so I just went out and started doing it, and it was trial and error, and it was a long way from the origins of the original New York movement, but that gave me a different sensibility. "When I did eventually go to New York, I realised that my story was very different … and I discovered that there was so much more going on in New York than just graffiti on trains. "There was a whole genre of street art movement that had been going on for some time as well, so I just kind of married those two ideas, and I just kept travelling and kept doing stuff, and eventually it just became my whole way of life." When he first started painting on walls (without permission), he assumed he was being very clandestine but realised he wasn't when people began to seek him out with commissions, and he said, "it just snowballed from there". His distinctive figures in shades of grey and black aren't just an aesthetic choice; it's also a practical response to working on walls. "When I got older, I started to think more about the process, and I decided to restrict my palette on purpose, but also the Western Australian environment was such that if you had colour in a work, it would fade really quickly. "That drove me to think: if I want something to last, if it doesn't get painted over, the sun will bleach it, so how do I work with that?" "I kind of worked out a process of creating this palette for myself that really worked with my sensibilities and my idea of how I wanted to try and portray emotions." One of the most unusual elements of the exhibition at AGWA is that a single work covers the floor in one gallery and stretches up the wall. It also features a mirrored surface that visitors can walk on and leave their footprints. "The whole show is about secrets and the idea of secrets and being able to reflect on your secrets, and we just thought that there would be some surface that could help facilitate that way of thinking. "Doing things in the street — some people really care for it, and some people don't, and that the idea of people being able to walk across those works or not is entirely up to them "I think that'll be an interesting thing to see and I think it'll cause people to pause in their process of walking through the exhibition so that'll be interesting." Curator Isobel Wise said the effect, for the visitor, would be both immersive and "almost overwhelming, and she hoped the elements of the exhibition would encourage people to slow down and reflect further. Getting Mills and his work in the gallery had come after several years of conversations. "I'm just really excited for audiences to move through a space where they get to experience this beautiful balance of something joyous and playful that unfolds in Stormie's work," she said. "That's also balanced with the really complex emotions that we all have as people, and his work navigates those polarities really beautifully, and it's both tender and really exciting to see how audiences are going to engage with that." The exhibition also includes an element of audience participation that could allow visitors to unburden themselves of their own secrets. "[There is] a space next to the exhibition where people can go in and write their secrets down, and the process of writing secrets down is similar to journaling ideas," Mills said. "When you write things down, it moves those things from one part of your brain that has no timeline to another part of your brain that does have a timeline, and that puts things in the past. "So the idea of people being able to just let things go or unburden themselves or get rid of something will be a physical process but also helps mentally. and hopefully people will be able to go in there and get rid of some stuff." The room, swathed in dark curtains and ambient music, will also have a shredder for people to destroy their secrets after getting them down on paper. The paper fragments will be collected by Mills and used to create an artwork at the end of the exhibition's run. In keeping with his ambition to live a creative life, a few years ago Mills and his wife Melissa moved to Venice, and his life took a fresh turn. "I fell in love with Venice through rowing, and so I wanted to learn how to row a gondola and to row around Venice, so we moved to Venice," he said. "I haven't got my own gondola; they're an 11-metre boat, but I'm a member of a rowing club, a couple of rowing clubs actually, and I can borrow boats, so I'm able to row around Venice." He hasn't stopped painting; he has been invited to be a guest of honour at the Florence Biennale next year, and he continues to paint walls. "There's a different attitude to street art in Italy because traditionally graffiti was done by a lot of people in a lot of places," he said. "I've been out painting at night in Italy, and people have sat and watched, and it's not seen as a bad or illegal thing; it's just somebody else making a comment about things, and it's encouraged." All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains is on display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until November 8, 2026, and entry is free.