Gala Hills

Gala Hills (b,2001) is a multidisciplinary artist. She has studied painting and fine art at the Ruskin and at the Slade, seeking a intimate collaboration between academic research and anarchistic creativity. She has shown with various galleries in London, including a recent solo exhibition with the Bomb Factory in Holborn.
During her time studying in London, she learnt to reappreciate growing up in rural Dartmoor. felt a lacking of things she had taken for granted, the stories you’d learn or make up about the landscape, the rocks and forests. These imaginative stories seemed so every day to her, learning of Victorian spinsters reassembling the local Neolithic standing stones or the giants who formed the cliffs down in Cornwall, mixing history, geology and myth.
The yearning for these narratives formed her painting practice. Being dyslexic and autistic, her parents decided to home educate her, and she kept her curiosity alive this way. They travelled around, learning constantly. This freedom to keep moving and exploring presents itself in her newly re-found love of the rural landscapes.
Her current direction is derived from paintings she made on a beach on the Lizard in Cornwall. With rain pouring down and a dark grey sea, she used sea and rainwater to paint watercolour on paper. In a kind of automatic drawing process, she began making human animal hybrids, evoking in her the ancient welsh Mabinogion, tales of owl women and talking fish, remembering mythologies she had learnt in her childhood. Landscape directly informed her process, and symbolically drove a new direction in her thinking.
She completed Her BFA at the Ruskin School of Art in 2023, and her Masters in Painting at the Slade in 2025, her practice fuses imagination and intense research, drawing inspiration from mythological texts, folk music and traditions cross culturally, and outsider female figures from throughout history. Growing up home educated, she had no formal boundaries between subjects, enabling her to seek knowledge holistically, through experience and practice, learning through documentary, reading and conversations with academics and artists.
Subsequently her research cross pollenates between subjects, combining history, mythology, literature, chemistry, zoology and theology to generate new themes and visual story telling methods.