Perimeter Edition 117 Launch: Dredging up the Past
Presented by Perimeter and Gertrude Contemporary
Details
Free, no booking required
NGV Federation Court
180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC, Australia
Dates
Sun 17 May 3 – 4pm
Join us at the NGV Art Book Fair for the launch of Perimeter Edition 117: Dredging up the Past, presented as part of Melbourne Design Week. The launch will take the form of a conversation between Mark Feary and Charlotte Day, opening questions around institutional memory and the shifting conditions that shape artist-centred organisations.
Taking the publication as a starting point, the discussion will reflect on Gertrude’s history and probe the tensions between archival impulse and forward momentum: what it means to revisit institutional histories, how they are written, and what remains unresolved or contested within them.
Charlotte Day brings a long-standing relationship to Gertrude to the conversation, having worked at Gertrude in the 1990s, and as editor of the organisation’s 20-year anniversary publication, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 1985 – 2005 (2005). Day’s perspective, alongside Mark Feary’s curatorial work across institutional and independent contexts, sets the stage for a discussion that moves between reflection and speculation—examining how contemporary institutions narrate themselves, and how those narratives might be productively unsettled.
In representation of artistic and curatorial voices, Mark Feary and Charlotte Day will be joined by Nathan Beard and Tamsen Hopkinson. Nathan Beard is a former Gertrude Studio Artist who works across photography, sculpture and installation to draw on personal archives, family objects and ornamental motifs to examine what it means to inherit a relationship to culture that is shaped by both proximity and distance. Tamsen Hopkinson is an artist, curator and curatorial consultant. Hopkinson is the Director of Seol for, a curatorial consultancy studio specialising in contemporary art across the Asia Pacific, and curated Octopus 23: THE FIELD at Gertrude Contemporary in 2023.
Presented within the context of the Melbourne Art Book Fair, the launch offers an opportunity to situate Gertrude’s publishing and program within broader conversations around contemporary art institutions: where they have come from, how they are sustained, and where they might yet go.
Participants
Mark Feary
Mark Feary is the Artistic Director of Gertrude. He has worked within the visual art sector for over twenty years in a range of contemporary art centres, universities, museums and artist-led initiatives, with an emphasis on contemporary art and almost exclusively within the not-for-profit sector. Feary has worked in curatorial and programming roles at Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Artspace, Sydney; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and West Space, Melbourne.
Charlotte Day
Charlotte Day is Director of Art Museums at the University of Melbourne, with oversight of Buxton Contemporary and The Potter Museum of Art. Previously Director of Monash University Museum of Art, Charlotte has more than twenty-five years’ experience as a curator and arts manager. She was formerly an Associate Curator at ACCA, a Director for Centre for Contemporary Photography and has held positions on several arts boards and local, state and federal government arts and funding panels, including holding positions at Gertrude from 1995 onward.
Nathan Beard
Nathan Beard is a multidisciplinary artist who draws from his Australian-Thai heritage to unpack the porous and precarious influences of culture and memory. In exploring the slippery intersection of family history, archives and broad cultural signifiers of ‘Thainess’, Beard’s work articulates the complexities surrounding authenticity and diasporic identity. Beard was a Gertrude Studio Artist from 2023 to 2025 and served as a board member from 2024 to 2025. Nathan Beard’s exhibition highlights include Adelaide Biennial: Yield Strength (2026), TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles, TarraWarra Museum of Art (2025), Sedula Cura, FUTURES (2025), Cicerone, Gertrude Glasshouse (2025), Ratana, AVA (2025), A Puzzlement, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2023) and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2022), Husk, FUTURES (2022), Low Yield Fruit, AVA (2022), White Gilt 2.0, Firstdraft (2020), A dense intimacy (with Lindy Lee), Bus Projects (2019) and WA Focus: Nathan Beard, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2017).
Tamsen Hopkinson
Tamsen Hopkinson (b. 1986 Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa, Ngāti Pāhauwera) is an artist, curator and curatorial consultant from Aotearoa based in Naarm Melbourne. Hopkinson is the Director of Seolfor, a curatorial consultancy studio specialising in contemporary art across the Asia Pacific.
Tamsen’s practice is an expression of Tino Rangatiratanga, Indigenous Sovereignty and considers ideas around education, language and translation, materiality and sound. She is interested in alternative exhibition models informed by collaboration, artist run initiatives and community organisations. Tamsen has held curatorial positions across key contemporary art organisations in Naarm over the last decade including West Space Inc., TCB Art Inc., UN Projects, Footscray Community Arts and The Substation. Hopkinson curated Octopus 23: THE FIELD at Gertrude Contemporary in 2023.