For more than 30 years, Mills has been granted rare access to paint in the Italian catacombs and numerous European pagan sites. From there, beginning with his onsite work and the influence of his dreams, he returns to his studio to work on pieces—often for years.

"All my work begins with my dreams recorded in sketchbooks with narratives and drawings," writes the artist. These dreams are often prophetic, telling me where I need to travel to work – to make one world, one cosmology, where the seen and the unseen co-exist. Once my dreams have led me to a site, I develop my pieces slowly, carrying them back and forth between sites, cross-pollinating ideas, locations, and subject matter – all united in the studio. Time is no longer linear, but elastic, continuous and circular.

The catacombs – my primary focus – are silent mazes, cold and dank. Skeletons, nearly two thousand years old, embrace one another in their tombs, and, if disturbed, would turn to dust. Paintings and carvings form mysterious, iconographic hybrids of an emerging spiritual language. Worms with millipede-like legs coexist with 10-inch long phosphorescent mantises that give off an eerie green light. Blind translucent spiders the size of my hand make clicking sounds on the tunnel walls while aphids skitter by the thousands up stalactites.”