Three Things I Love: Street artist Stormie Mills names his Perth faves
By Emma Young
Each week, WAtoday reaches out to the Perth community to discover three things people love most about our coastal capital. Today we feature Stormie Mills, a West Australian artist who has for the past 18 months been based in Venice. His distinctive works are all over Perth streets, but his private and public commissions can also be seen around Australia, the UK, USA, Europe and Asia. His latest local exhibition, Once Upon a Sometimes, is on now and runs until December 7 at FORM Gallery, Perth.
Mills on the river.
I love Perth’s river. It changes like the seasons; in winter it can be quiet and calm, in summer busy and a bit wild. It’s so diverse, the way it snakes from the hills to the sea and up to under the city bridges, but I particularly love the section near Guildford, and where the Helena River joins the Swan in Bassendean. Ever since I was a kid in the 1970s I spent quite a bit of time on the river, sailing and swimming, and the river was then full of prawns as well. As a youngster, it was more about swimming. It was a whole-day activity: riding your bike to the river, riding around until you were boiling hot, then jumping in from a jetty, then repeating the whole process. But if you have a small boat, there is a lot to explore. I used to have a little canoe, our friends had boats and there was a sailing club and a rowing team at one stage, then later my friends would have boats. It’s evolved so much in my lifetime. Now there are cycle paths that follow the river in every direction for walking and cycling and rollerskating, and so many cafes and restaurants and services, playgrounds and exercise areas. Now living in Venice, surrounded by water, I noticed that the activities on and near and water have a slower pace and simple feel in Perth. But it was being in Venice that gave me that perspective. Bodies of water make life slower.
Work by Stormie Mills.Credit: Photo: Stefan Gosatti
I love Perth’s greenness. Quite often when you fly into Perth in summer it looks quite brown but when you are at any sort of elevation you notice how many trees there are. Hyde Park is an obvious example, one of the city’s largest internal green spaces besides Kings Park, and I know the shot-hole borer has devastated that area now which is really sad, but there is so much greenery spread throughout the city. When we lived in Dianella we lived atop a hill and I would stand and look across to the city and the hills beyond and see so much green. That is not something you get in most cities. You can be somewhere like Hyde Park and see flocks of parrots and galahs flying through making this raucous noise … following their food sources and those paths they have had way longer than we’ve been around. As you go further out you notice that less … but to have Hyde Park, Lake Monger and all the interconnected swamplands dotted through a city is pretty amazing.
The isolation of Perth is something historically that is waning, but it’s what gave me the understanding of self to make work about isolation. It’s also given many Perth-based creative people something different to their work, less external influence, more introspection. When I was younger, I remember friends in school with older siblings in touring bands, and then they would take off around Australia and eventually in the world – one, his older brother was in The Stems and that was a big thing. They showed it was possible. The way I was brought up the idea was that Perth was so far away from everything, and it held a bit of hopelessness. I didn’t realise at the time that that isolation was actually a gift. It gave me the opportunity, as a kid who drew all the time, to just draw my way out of that. I know this from other friends in big cities around the world: when you are bombarded with other things, the chance to be creative, which requires mental space, you don’t necessarily get it quite so easily. I could get away and be so charged and inspired, but then come home and get the space and time to put it into context and make work in Perth, and that allowed me to be quite prolific.
Mills with his new exhibition at FORM Gallery.
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