Staring from a great height at the endless plains, red-dirt roads and mining pits cut like open wounds across Western Australia, artist Bec Juniper sees something surprising. This rugged, bullish land seems strangely soft and feminine to her.

She calls it "the Great Southern", that stretch of country sauntering down from Perth to the coast and across to the Great Australian Bight, passing salt lakes, goldfields and paddocks. So flat that, from an aircraft's cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, she can't even see the horizon. "It just disappears into the distance."

West Australian artist Bec Juniper with one of her abstract landscapes. Credit:James Brickwood

To the eyes of an east-coast Australian, the wild west looks tough and unpitying. But Juniper, a landscape artist from Fremantle, sees something different. "WA is exported as a masculine place of mining, men in hi-vis, big machinery, big trucks. It's tough, it's rough, it's hard. You can work there for 10 years and come back 30 years older," she says.

"But the opposite is actually true. It's a very fragile landscape. Yes, some things are spiky and horrible. Yes, it can kill you if you don't know what you're doing. But there is a lot of softness there; perhaps a feminine magic. It is really quite beautiful and changeable."