The Design File interviews Christopher Bassi on capturing the nostalgia of home

11 Aug 2022

“A huge part of my work is about memory and accessing place from memory. It started as a personal story. Painting the connections between Brisbane, where I was born, and Far North Queensland, where we visit family, and Thursday Island where Mum was born and raised.”

Christopher Bassi recently spoke to Jirra Lulla Harvey of The Design Files on his place of inspiration and creative process. As a decent of Meriam and Yupungathi, his country of origin is in the Torres Strait and the Cape York Peninsula. Bassi engages with his paintings as sociological and historical text and as a means to address issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies, and colonial legacies in Australia and the South Pacific. His works transform into a space for reimagination and speculative storytelling that consider questions of history and place and the entangling of personal and collective experience.

He mentions, “My relationship to place is different. For me, there is a sense of home, a sense of belonging. We talk about Country, a spiritual, inherited relationship to place. There are cultural perspectives that come from who I am, my way of being in the world, and there’s story – my stories, stories of home, connection, and memory.”

Images: Christopher Bassi, Twin PawPaw, 2021, oil on canvas, 100 x 90 cm