Stormie Mills: All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains
Art Gallery of Western Australia
August 22, 2026
Acclaimed Perth-raised street artist Stormie Mills, with a career spanning over forty years and his works near ubiquitous across many of this city’s hidden corners, brought All the secrets are buried between the oceans and the mountains to the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), running from now until November 8.
When entering the exhibition galleries, the editorial choice that jumped out immediately was the mirrored floors. The first impression given was of a sense of vertigo, closely followed by weightlessness. Blended under the viewers’ feet, the concrete brutalism of AGWA’s tessellated ceilings paired almost perfectly with Mills’ preferred colour palette of black, silver, and muted grey—an example of visual art, most often an eye-level experience, given the full 360-degree treatment.
Monumental skeletons were also painted, splayed across the floor of each room, their bony hands reaching for the artwork on the walls. Their eye sockets displayed base intelligence rather than the mere emptiness of death, as if directing the viewer to preferred pieces. Then, as the audience grew more focused on the walls, they began to forget the bones under their feet, literally walking over the dead without a second thought.
Mills holds a fascination for skeletons and skulls, a recurring motif across his body of work, though it is less clear whether he uses these to delineate life from death or rather the internal from the external. In The pain is gone but the memory remains, two figures take up the canvas space, a skeleton pointing at a person with a ship across their chest. Is the ship a permanent tattoo or wistful imagination? Are the two characters different iterations of the same person, or could the dead be envious of the dreams of the living?
In another room, Mills had hung portraits of several of his fellow street artists, both colleagues and friends, mostly in greyscale but with garish pink skulls over the top that appeared hastily added. Almost all these sitters had used pseudonyms, another bifurcation of self, the skulls added by the artist as a common thread between each, yet also an indication that the only trait shared was physiology—beyond the skull and into the soul we are all unknowable.
Away from his skeletons and portraits, Mills paints live characters as all sharp angles, pot bellies, distended limbs, and moon-shaped heads, the latter waxed or waned dependent on the artist’s whimsy. They often look lonely, melancholic, or tired to the point of exhaustion. In There is unbroken continuity, a figure with blackened eyes and a creased forehead holds a dark hole a few inches above their chest. This blank space appears to be a rip or tear in the universe, an endless void that cannot be filled. When the object label was read, it came as little surprise that this piece had been painted shortly after one of Mills’ elderly relatives had passed.
First Punch, his only work on display that had more than one subject in frame not involving skeletons, showed two boxers at the point of violent connection, one face obliterated in darkness as head trauma, while the antagonist looked on his opponent numbly, in a sense not too distant from concussion themselves. The secrets these characters held were not happy ones.
Pivoted to the oceans and mountains of the show title, Mills had painted two immense landscapes specifically for this exhibition that faced each other across the room. The endless dusk, his water feature, showcased waves crashing upon a lonely shore, with their imagined noise and constant motion drowning out any human thought. In contrast, the high-altitude piece, There was no one, propelled the viewer into the quiet, seemingly serene climes of crystalline alpine air, before one recalled this environment was just as kinetic as the sea, if taken on a timescale far beyond most human comprehension.
With both landscapes a multitude of greys, mirrored below with the concrete ceiling above, the pieces bled into the location and vice versa as the gallery leached into the art, perhaps another moment of disorientation given before focus returned.
On exiting the galleries devoted to Mills, there was a side room with a further exhibition feature. The audience could write their own secrets and place these papers into a visible shredder, with these torn shreds of paper to be recycled for the artist’s next piece. With dim lighting and staging akin to a crypt, soft music as if at a spa, and the delightful pop of the shredder that gave all sorts of ASMR vibes, this chamber of secrets was an unexpectedly joyful end to the journey.
With his visual style immediately recognisable and a career stretched back to the mid-80s, it was somewhat surprising that this was the first solo exhibition Mills has held at AGWA, or indeed any of the state art galleries around the country. However, the old maxim that ‘good things take time’ was perhaps in play here, and the works on display were fabulous, thought-provoking, and easily provided a myriad of nuance, interpretation, and debate for audience members to take home with them.