From secondhand shops to a sweet peach negroni, this Lego Masters star has Perth sorted

In this series, WAtoday reaches out to the Perth community to discover three things people love most about our coastal capital. Today we feature Alex Towler, who began his career as an environmental engineer, working mostly with natural waterways and urban stormwater, even while channelling his creative energy into performing with multiple punk bands at Perth music venues. After featuring on Nine’s Lego Masters with long-time friend Jackson Harvey, the duo developed unique sculptural displays that combine Lego with human artefacts. The concept grew into exhibition RELICS: A New World Rises which has been touring Australia and New Zealand since 2023. Towler is now co-author of new Fremantle Press book A New World Rises: Tales of a Lego Future, alongside Harvey and Cristy Burne. In this book, he and Harvey have used second-hand bricks to build worlds for the story, inside discarded jetskis, pianos, ATMs and much more.

I love Perth’s music scene. It’s amazing that such an isolated city pumps out such incredible bands – like when you leave a jar of salsa at the back of the fridge and weird and wonderful mould grows there. It’s festering, but in a cool way – this incredible creative energy that has birthed Tame Impala, back in the day there was Gyroscope, Sly Withers, Spacey Jane and Stella Donnelly. Since we started RELICS I’ve been going to see bands a lot less, and the music scene has struggled post-COVID but Perth remains a great place for live music – and I very much intend to get back out there when I get the time. My standout albums are Sound Shattering Sound, by Gyroscope, Lonerism from Tame impala and Gardens from Sly Withers – I used to see those guys every weekend.

I love Perth’s secondhand and antique shops. Because the RELICS exhibition is set in the future, humans are gone from Planet Earth and the mini-figures inhabit the objects humans have left behind. We have to find a lot of secondhand things and there’s a great strip of stores in Guildford near the Guildford Hotel that have become a standard destination for finding set dressing and artefacts. One of our displays is a bookshelf and the concept was each shelf had different Lego builds that match the theme of the books on the shelf, so there was nautical one, a medical one – it was a very fun challenge to find the books that matched the genres we wanted to build around, and justify how a title might fit a genre.

I love Perth’s small bars, particularly Bar Love. Our workshop is in West Perth and friends of mine Murray Walsh and Pippa Canavan recently opened this small cocktail bar in Northbridge and we love going there to debrief after a tough day in the workshop. It’s just the two of us trying to build a whole exhibition, there’s huge creative work going on determining how plinths will go together and so on – the creative process goes way beyond the Lego. We walk 900 metres to Bar Love, it’s that kind of cool independent business Perth really fosters, it’s got a great handpainted sign on the door, the bartenders have cocktail-making awards, it’s just got a really cool vibe. Pip makes an unbelievable peach negroni.

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