Graffiti News

Stormie Mills has moved from Perth walls into the state gallery

The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) in Perth is showing a solo exhibition by street artist Stormie Mills, titled All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains. It runs until 8 November 2026 and entry is free. ABC News reported on the exhibition on 15 August 2026.

Who Stormie Mills is

Stormie Mills was born in the United Kingdom, moved to Perth with his family as a child, and moved again to Wales as a teenager, where he encountered street art in the 1980s. He has worked for around 40 years. According to ABC News, as a teenager starting out he wondered how artists ever got their work inside the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Four decades later, that gallery gave him a solo show.

Mills told ABC News the exhibition was an honour and a privilege. On how he began, he said there was nobody to teach him any of it, so he simply went out and started doing it. He also said he has always drawn, and is not sure he ever had an artistic career in the usual sense. Curator Isobel Wise said the show came together after several years of conversations.

What is inside the exhibition

The exhibition has four main elements. The first is a pair of paintings, each 12 metres long. The second is a single work that covers the floor of one gallery and continues up the wall, with a mirrored surface that visitors walk across and leave footprints on. ABC News reported the mirror was intended to help people reflect on their own secrets.

The third element is a set of large-scale portraits of other street artists, including Kid Acne, which Mills painted on site at the gallery. The fourth is a room hung with dark curtains and filled with ambient music, where visitors write a secret on paper and then destroy it in a shredder. Mills plans to collect the shredded fragments and make a final artwork from them once the exhibition closes.

Mills described the show as being about secrets, the idea of secrets, and being able to reflect on your own. Wise said she was excited for audiences to move through a space where they experience that balance.

Why the paintings are grey

Mills paints in monochrome, in greys and blacks, depicting abstract figures carrying complicated emotions. The palette is not only an aesthetic decision. He told ABC News that if he wants something to last, then even if it does not get painted over, the sun will bleach it.

That single sentence explains a great deal about how outdoor painters think. Gallery paintings are made to survive decades in controlled light and humidity. Murals are made in full knowledge of ultraviolet light, rain, repainting and demolition. Reducing the palette is a response to those conditions, not a stylistic flourish invented afterwards.

What this means for people who follow street art

Anyone who has followed street art for long knows that its default condition is disappearance. A wall you like is gone the following month, and what remains is a handful of photographs. A museum show suspends that condition for a while, which is precisely why a street artist entering a state gallery reads as a bigger event than a gallery painter doing the same.

The exhibition also inverts the usual arrangement. A museum is normally the place where things are preserved. Mills has installed a paper shredder inside one and asked visitors to destroy what they have just written. The institution that keeps things is being used to stage an act of erasure.

The same condition applies to every city, including yours. The piece on the wall near you may not be there in six months. That is why Wallscape keeps a map and a feed: recording where something is, and photographing it before it goes, is what eventually becomes the record.

Venice, gondolas and a different set of rules

Mills now lives in Venice with his wife, Melissa. According to ABC News, he moved there to learn to row a gondola and is an active member of rowing clubs in the city. He said he fell in love with Venice through rowing, and that this was why he wanted to learn to row a gondola.

He also told ABC News that Italian attitudes toward street art differ considerably from Anglo-American ones, with painting at night encouraged rather than discouraged. Mills has been invited as guest of honour at the Florence Biennale next year.

How to see it

All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains runs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth until 8 November 2026. Entry is free.

Source: ABC News, 15 August 2026.