Beyond First Impressions: Stormie Mills & All the Secrets are Buried Between the Oceans and the Mountain
Written by Jiri Palayekar
Published on July 30th, 2026
Before I spoke with Stormie Mills, my understanding of his work was largely drawn from surface level observations – cartoon-y and stylized figures with somber looking expressions painted in black-and-white. It wasn’t until our conversation that I realized that I did not have a full picture of Mills’ characters. Rather than just depicting despair, Mills stated that he saw these figures as portraits of strength.
“I’m documenting … people that have been less fortunate or downtrodden but have not given up. I’m looking for people that have that resilience and hope in them.”
Born in Wales and later moving to Western Australia as a child, Mills grew up inspired by the illustrations of Quentin Blake and New York City graffiti. Films like Beat Street and videos featuring Rock Steady Crew exposed Mills to graffiti long before he made his way to New York City to see it in person.
“I saw New York graffiti, and I was really interested in it … When I saw the characters that were in between the lettering of New York-style graffiti, I was really enthralled.”
Inspired by these things, Mills started to teach himself how to paint in his small Australian hometown that had little connection with the culture he admired so much. Mills states that, looking back on this development, he sees those years as “lost in translation” because, without access to graffiti’s unwritten rules or community, he reinterpreted graffiti through his own instincts, however, it still gave him his own “visual tools to communicate.”
While graffiti in New York City evolved from artists competing to stand out among many others, Mills’ experience was the exact opposite. In a small town, anonymity was impossible.
“Everybody in the street knew it was me. So my story wasn’t the same. My story was entirely different, so I had to kind of work out how I tell my story or how I depict what I’m trying to say.”
Eventually, his graffiti got him into trouble, and his parents sent him back to Wales to live with his grandmother. His grandmother, whom Mills credited with teaching him “how to exist in life” offered Mills stability while he continued to draw and develop his interests. It was during this time in his life that he also got the opportunity to visit New York City in 1986, an experience that became transformative for the young Mills as it opened his eyes to how he was doing graffiti and street art, and he came back to the UK with a different mindset. Later on, Mills met a friend whose parents encouraged their artistic pursuits, and he started to discover that his art didn’t have to exist clandestinely.
Soon, locals were inviting the teenagers to paint walls. From there, Mills traveled across the UK, met other graffiti writers and street artists, and joined Birmingham-based Ikonoklast collective which was developing their own artistic voices rather than imitating what had come before. 
This period of Mills’ artistic journey helped him get a deeper appreciation for graffiti and street artists, and opened his mind to the artists who had created an entirely new visual language.
“They created a visual language… There were a lot of New York writers and style writers that created this language for all of us to go out and experiment with.”
Mills returned to Perth in the early 1990s, where he brought that mindset with him. He became an advocate for spaces where younger artists could come and paint and develop their work. This work ended up coinciding with a newly elected Western Australian government which was taking a hard stance against graffiti. This caused Mills to work within communities to create opportunities for artists while also developing his own practice. After years of helping others, he eventually realized it was time to focus on his own work.
That journey has come together in his first major solo exhibition, All the Secrets Are Buried Between the Oceans and the Mountains.
The exhibition is built around the idea of secrets.
“The concept of this exhibition is all about secrets… A lot of people think secrets are always bad, but some people hold good secrets also.”
For Mills, this exhibition celebrates the identities people build for themselves within graffiti and street art culture. Writers adopt names that become their alter egos. Those aliases can function as armor, which allow artists to inhabit different versions of themselves. In this exhibition, Mills attempts to look beyond these personas.
Many of the works are portraits inspired by friends and collaborators he has met throughout his career in street art and graffiti, people who are known publicly by their aliases or tag names but are remembered by Mills for something more personal.
“Everybody either gets a nickname or is given a name… that name gives them a kind of armor. I’m trying to paint a portraiture of who they really are… It’s important to pay homage to those people and thank them for their friendship and mentorship.”
Mills describes this exhibition as an immersive installation where the viewers encounter not just the art on walls, but the environment that physically reflects the exhibition’s themes.
Mills describes this exhibition as an immersive installation where the viewers encounter not just the art on walls, but the environment that physically reflects the exhibition’s themes. Like the secrets that are at the base, the experience asks audiences to look beyond first impressions, beyond the sad and somber expressions of the characters displayed in Mills’ work, to search for other stories—stories of perseverance and hope.
Jiri Palayekar is an artist specializing in music, illustration, and graffiti and a grad student at NYU studying the histories of decline and aesthetics of graffiti. They are interested in studying the intersection of identity and placemaking as it manifests in graffiti and urban art, DIY music, and alt subcultures.