In Between Beasts and Stones, Gala Hills invites viewers into a world where myth and memory blur, and the boundaries between the human, animal, and elemental dissolve. Presented within the intimate setting of a Mayfair home, the exhibition brings together Hills’ smaller watercolours on cotton paper with her larger oil paintings on canvas — a dialogue between delicacy and depth, between fluid instinct and grounded myth.
Rooted in the rugged terrain of Dartmoor, where she was home-educated amid rocks, rain, and folklore, Hills’ practice braids together historical research and anarchic imagination. Her figures — half-creature, half-woman — inhabit landscapes charged with ancient energies: shapeshifting beings, stone guardians, and spectral hybrids emerge from washes of pigment as if unearthed from the soil itself. These scenes feel both ancient and immediate, like fragments of a forgotten epic rediscovered in the subconscious.
Hills’ approach resists boundaries — between disciplines, materials, and even species. In her hands, mythology becomes a living organism; paint turns to weather; the personal merges with the collective. The resulting works feel both tender and untamed — at once playful, tragic, and deeply alive.
Installed domestically rather than institutionally, Between Beasts and Stones invites viewers to experience myth as something intimate and continuous — a presence that seeps quietly into everyday life, like a tide rising through familiar rooms.
