I meet with Christopher Bassi in his studio on infamous Boundary Street (the former margin of Magandjin / Brisbane’s once segregated city limits). It is well-lit and crisp white—flanked by large canvases in gradating stages of completion and a desk with the usual office tackle. Books naturally pile around, and chronicle painters of influence including Velázquez, Goya, Delacroix, Rembrandt, and William Blake. Beginning with classes in oil as a child and moving to textile design in his adolescence, Bassi undertook formal training at Queensland College of Art in 2017 where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in painting and art theory. Painting—the very impost of painters—is an indissoluble premise of his practice.
Bassi is first and, c.1321, and John Milton’s , 1667, as influences; but also, Caribbean poets and writers such as Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, and Jean Rhys. As a Meriam and Yupangathi man whose matrilineal descent connects him to the Torres Strait Islands, Bassi’s global interests and other cultural attendances place his work in generative tension. He shows me a handdrawn family tree that charts British, Indo-Muslim, and Malay ancestry to underline this point—and in doing so, operationalises the “archipelagic thinking” of Caribbean poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant. Posited as a relational means of watery difference (kinship) between island societies, archipelagic thinking is Bassi’s means of placing himself at the juncture of his manifold cross-cultural contacts and influences, from where broader and more localised “Islander” themes and motifs appear and are negotiated.
