Floral blooms abound in Bassi’s Far North ‘sermon’
Christopher Bassi’s floral artworks celebrate the sacred and bask in the beauty of the natural world.
Christopher Bassi came to art a little later than many. Beginning his studies at Queensland College of Art when he was 25, his poetic ability to bring together the love of painting (that saw him begin lessons at age seven) with his heritage as a Meriam and Yupungathi man from the Torres Strait islands has seen his profile rise steadily in recent years.
The 35-year-old’s solo exhibition at Cairns Art Gallery, Notes for a Palm Sermon, brings Bassi’s work home to a place of familiar connections, also coinciding with this year’s Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, the annual cultural showcase that runs July 10-13 with art, dance, fashion, talks, masterclasses and four days of events.
While Bassi’s work was profiled nationally last year at the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum, the Museum of Brisbane’s Rearranged: Art of the Flower, and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera, in addition to a commercial exhibition with Amez Yavuz in Sydney, Notes for a Palm Sermon is a holistic exploration of Bassi’s relationship with this place at the top of Queensland.
While Bassi was raised in Brisbane, Cairns is the closest city to his Torres Strait islander family. He says his current exhibition offered the opportunity to explore ideas that are always part of his practice, with new ideas anchored by a few older works.
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Central is the image of a church Bassi found at a site known as Adam (later Poid) on the island of Moa. It is transformed as a tiled shape taken from the façade, with its steep roof, round window and classic pointed door laid flat (pictured, below).
“I visited the site without knowing that the church was there,” he says. “Its existence introduced conflicting ideas of sacredness, which became a physical metaphor. I have explored it visually through my conflicted feelings about the Christianity that was imposed on the communities in the Torres Strait, and my own concept of sacredness, which comes from the landscape itself. The starting point of the show was trying to express this friction.”
It is the landscape and its architectures, natural and cultural, that dominate the other works, with the church and its white tiles evoking the ornate graves found in the Torres Strait but also a gravestone or tomb.
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“It’s an architecture that notes the history of place,” Bassi says. “In this instance it’s used to nullify the European architecture of the church itself and introduced to speak to the event of colonisation, as an expression of mourning and loss.”
‘It’s the landscape or the sacredness of the natural world from a First Nations perspective’
Yet Bassi turns to paint to express his deep connection to the natural environment of this place. These large paintings – of mangroves, palm trees, hibiscus, shells and palm weaving – take us close, being intimate views of the verdant plant and sea life of this place, cast in a muted interior light. Integral to that is Bassi’s training within a Western picturesque painting tradition that also casts the landscape as spiritual and sacred – with a crucial and personally driven difference.
“It’s the landscape or the sacredness of the natural world from a First Nations perspective,” he says. “Country is the place our stories come from. I guess I also see the everydayness of it, with a capture of its qualities that is a sacred act. I wanted to draw a line between the actual landscape and its transition to, for example, a floral representation.”
Angela Goddard, director of Griffith University Art Museum, writes for the exhibition catalogue that: “Unlike European vanitas traditions focused on mortality and transience, Bassi’s botanical subjects celebrate enduring cultural traditions.”
It is in their beautifully rendered affirmation of culture and nature, for example, elevating the mangroves that echo his grandmother’s drift from island to island, and celebrating an ecology that resists the forces of climate change that Bassi’s work exudes a binding power through his ecology of making and thinking.
The exhibition title, Palm Sermon, refers to biblical texts but Bassi uses it to elevate the palm itself.
“The history of painting provides a backdrop for the expressions of the sacred in a Western tradition, in context and cadence,” he says. “Knowing that painting offers this allows me to find my own response, and introduces another type of spirituality, grounded in family and place.”
Christopher Bassi: Notes for a Palm Sermon continues at Cairns Art Gallery until September 7.
Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Tanks Art Centre, Cairns, July 10-13.