Perimeter Editions 117
Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005 – 2025

Gertrude is a contemporary visual art centre and studio complex in Naarm Melbourne, dedicated to risk and ambition. Gertrude’s model has influenced how contemporary art is supported and presented in Australia, and demonstrates a sustained institutional support for experimental practice. Co-published by Gertrude and Perimeter Editions, Dredging up the Past indexes its exhibitions from 2005 to 2025, and its studio and exhibiting artists from 1983 to 2025.

Edited by Sharon Flynn, and designed by Narelle Brewer, Dredging up the Past follows on from Gertrude’s previous twenty-year history, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine (2005), edited by Charlotte Day. An exercise in methodical indexing and recording, this 592-page tome covers every exhibition from the last two decades, alongside documentation of programs and projects, colloquial photographs, and creative and critical texts by the likes of James Nguyen, Nat Thomas, Kim Donaldson, and current directors Mark Feary and Tracy Burgess. In addition, a polyphonic text titled ‘Risk Contemporary’ draws on the contributions of former directors, curators, staff, studio artists, and board members to share anecdotes of conceptual risk during their time associated with Gertrude. The book closes with a vast ‘Catalogue of Personnel’ – a nod to the thousands of humans to have contributed to the organisation’s ecosystem from 1983 until 2025.

Dredging up the Past – which takes its title from the Richard Bell exhibition that inaugurated the first full year of programming at Gertrude’s current site in Preston South in 2018 – feels an apt description for the underpinnings of this book. Rather than reducing history to the stories of a few, this is about recording everything possible and affording it equal importance. This is no highlight reel; it is an excavation of each brick in Gertrude’s foundations.

592 pages, 17 x 24 cm, softcover, Perimeter Editions x Gertrude (Naarm Melbourne).