Leon PericlesStudio

Leon Pericles works from a property on the banks of the Margaret River, where Yalgardup Falls supplies the soundtrack and a bush track leads to a sculpture garden built from decades of found and recycled materials — glassware, rock, small figures gathered from different faiths, all worked into a folly the artist calls the Moss Ruins. Pericles has spent more than fifty years turning the Australian bush into an invented mythology centred on the imaginary town of Widji, in prints and paintings that are detailed, funny and faintly absurd. The Art Gallery of Western Australia gave him a twenty-year retrospective in 1989; in 2023 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the visual arts. His Margaret River studio and garden open by appointment, and again each September for Margaret River Region Open Studios, when the public can walk the grounds and see the workspace behind the prints. It is one of the region's few chances to see a major West Australian printmaker's process, not just the finished work.