Between Beasts and Stones: Gala Hills | Mayfair, London | By Appointment Only

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.