Christopher Bassi’s latest exhibition brings together paintings, architectural elements, and bronze sculptures into a meditation on cultural heritage and connection to Country. Drawing from his Meriam and Yupungathi maternal ancestral roots, Bassi develops a visual language that navigates his relationship to the Torres Strait.

Working within the oil painting tradition, Bassi positions himself among historical masters like Velázquez and Goya while reimagining these influences through his distinct cultural perspective. The medium’s layered, time-intensive nature provides an appropriate vehicle for exploring his reflective subject matter.

Unlike European Romanticists with their emphasis on heroic individualism, Bassi presents intimate encounters with Torres Strait landscapes. His compositional choices—forms emerging from darkness, fragmented views, close-cropped perspectives—create a strategic balance between revelation and concealment, respecting the boundaries of cultural knowledge.

The exhibition title Notes for a Palm Sermon acknowledges both the religious traditions throughout the Torres Strait and the significance of oral transmission of knowledge across generations. His paintings collect iconic Torres Strait motifs—banana flowers, mangrove seed pods, frangipani blooms, mango and wongai fruit—rendered with exquisite detail. These emerge from velvety darkness in warm umbers and ochres, creating a sense of mystery and revelation. Unlike European vanitas traditions focused on mortality and transience, Bassi’s botanical subjects celebrate enduring cultural traditions.

A triptych of fragmentary palm tree views demonstrates Bassi’s approach to representing Country through essential elements rather than traditional landscapes. These tightly cropped compositions create a cinematic, tropical atmosphere expressing both belonging and distance. Having grown up elsewhere but visiting Mer often, his paintings become connective threads to Country when away from home.

Architectural elements form another significant touchstone of Bassi’s practice. His renderings of the choir loft balustrade in the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church on Thursday Island and the church ruin at the old Poid settlement on Moa Island, bridge personal memory with communal sacred spaces. Architectural references can also function as symbolic doorways, particularly evident in representations of craft beadwork by family members, arranged in archway patterns. Two bronze sculptures mounted on plinths translate ephemeral shell ornaments into enduring metal, monumentalising living tradition while maintaining their connection to cultural knowledge and practice.

Bassi’s work brings lived and artistic histories into dialogue, exploring how narratives and motifs move through time and distance. His engagement with European painting traditions resonates with Christian faiths held throughout the Torres Strait, yet these influences are repurposed to encompass the cultural specificities of his heritage.

Through this carefully calibrated artistic language, Bassi creates work that is both deeply personal and universally resonant—a testament to art’s enduring power to transform how we understand connections to place, history, and each other.

– Angela Goddard, Director, Griffith University Art Museum

Christopher Bassi, Notes for a Palm Sermon is supported by the Double R Arts Foundation.