Christopher Bassi’s solo exhibition, Notes for a Palm Sermon, is the artist’s first exhibition at Cairns Art Gallery and augments the research into Torres Strait Islander art, culture and traditions that the Gallery fosters.

Staged to coincide with the 2025 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, the exhibition presents a body of new paintings commissioned by the Gallery and sculptural works from a private collection. Research for Notes for a Palm Sermon included travel to the Torres Strait for Bassi and was generously supported by the Double R Arts Foundation.

Bassi explained the premise of his exhibition as, “a meditation on the familiar geographies and matrilineal histories that bond the artist to family, place and time.”

A series of foliage-based paintings and sculptural objects of reverence illuminate moments of devotion with the spiritual, cultural, and ancestral currents that connect Bassi to the Torres Strait. His work deeply penetrates this connection to reveal how the sacred – not confined to formal worship or ceremony – unfolds through the presence of community and quietly resonant acts of remembering. 

These paintings and sculptures come together as a contemplation, a palm sermon, inviting viewers to consider how subtle gestures and meditations on place can reveal profound ways of being whilst located in place, and with each other. 

His Notes for a Palm Sermon comprise the metaphorical and meditative works arising from the artist’s perceptive research. In turn, Bassi said the works themselves, “spark renewed understanding of the self, the divine, and the manifold ties that hold communities in continuous, generative relation.”