Stormie Mills Finds Beauty in Decay

Work by 38-year-old Australian graffiti artist Stormie Mills is on show this month as part of Burning Bridges, an exhibition of illustrative, character-driven street art from around the world, presented by Campbarbossa, Gallery Nosco and Planet Patrol at the Brick Lane Gallery in east London. There are similarities in Mills' work with his high profile American contemporary Barry McGee. Both deal with beautiful decay and beautiful losers, and have gone from die-hard graffiti artists to critically acclaimed fine artists. Mills has already visited London as a guest speaker at the ICA. I spoke to him before he jetted off to solo shows in Sydney, Los Angeles and, in October, his home town of Perth.

Dazed Digital: Have you been drawing as long as you can remember?
Stormie Mills: Always. Since I was a kid. My respite from the rest of the world was being able to draw. I was always drawing people.

DD: When did you get into graffiti and spray paint?
SM: I first started spray painting in 1982 or '83. Living in Perth I was isolated. There wasn't anybody else doing it. My first forays were going out and painting solo or with kids that would quickly stop. Their passion wasn't really drawing, whereas it was always mine. I started with lettering. In traditional graffiti the characters are normally bookends to the lettering. I soon became more interested in what happened in between the letters, inside the cracks. That's when I started to concentrate on characters and from there started to examine the human condition.   

DD: Which is now a huge underlying theme in your work.
SM: It's important for me to be able to illustrate that sense of loss that people carry. Beauty amongst decay. I don't see it as a negative thing, but actually quite positive. People are incredibly resilient. No matter what life throws at them, people deal with it in some way. It's the way that they ultimately carry themselves after those knocks. The reason why people keep going - they don't just lie down and die. I'm really fascinated by that. How it manifests itself in people in such a way that people are drawn to it, but also repelled by it.

DD: What are the graffiti and art scenes like in Perth?
SM: Perth is very much a microcosm. There's a lot of artists that are very exciting coming out because it is so far removed that people really seem to analyse what it is that they're doing and work more in isolation. It's like a rainforest in the middle of Brazil that nobody has ever been to where plants and animals exist and develop in their little ecosystem. It grows and flourishes within its own space. And when it is exposed to the rest of the world it's different… and amazing.