born. 1979. Tāmaki Makaurau | Aotearoa New Zealand | lives. Bundjalung Country | NSW | Australia
Karma Barnes is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, recognised for her large-scale installations, sculpture and painting. She is the Grand Prix Winner of the Larnaca Biennale 2025 (Cyprus) for Co-Lapses, her large-scale suspended installation responding to the curatorial theme Along Lines and Traces. In 2026, she was appointed Arte Laguna Prize Shanghai Ambassador and presented CO-Lapses in Form Without Form《大象無形》 at K6 Space, HKRI Taikoo Hui, Shanghai, one of Shanghai's premier contemporary cultural destinations.
Selected by curator Sir Huang Yi, Barnes represented New Zealand as the sole New Zealand artist at the 10th Beijing International Art Biennale (2025–2026), becoming the first New Zealand artist invited to the Biennale in six years. In late 2026, she will represent New Zealand and Australia as an invited artist at the OSTEN Biennial of Drawing, Skopje, North Macedonia.
In 2024, Barnes' CO-Lapses was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Arte Laguna Prize and exhibited at Arsenale Nord, Venice. That same year, the New Mexico State University Art Museum (USA) acquired two significant works from her Relative Terrains series, marking her first major museum acquisition. One of these works was featured in CRUCES: New Acquisitions at the NMSU Art Museum in 2025. Her work has also been exhibited at institutions including MACRO Asilo – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Grafton Regional Gallery, Lismore Regional Gallery, Form & Concept (Santa Fe), and the NMSU Art Museum.
Barnes is an Ambassador for the Terzo Paradiso Rebirth-day Project, founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto, with related presentations in Italy, Azerbaijan, Cuba and previously at the Louvre Museum, France. In 2024, she undertook the UNIDEE Residency Program at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, further developing her research into ecological systems, material memory and socially engaged practice.
Working across installation, sculpture, suspended painting and participatory methodologies, Barnes engages intimately with raw pigments, clay, ash and sediment through evolving, site-responsive processes that foreground impermanence, disintegration and ecological sensitivity. Her practice investigates how matter holds memory, traces transformation, and reflects the deep interdependence between people and the places they inhabit.
A defining arc within her work is the orchestration of suspended forms and pigment-laden surfaces within responsive spatial systems. These installations are shaped by gravity, material flow and slow processes of accumulation and dispersal, generating durational environments where shifting sediments, falling pigments and incremental transformations become temporal markers. Through these conditions, Barnes creates spaces of embodied attention encouraging slow perception, attunement and direct encounter with material behaviour.
Her work is deeply informed by ecological theory, biomimicry, and new materialist philosophy, approaching materials as active, relational agents rather than inert substances. This philosophical framing underpins an aesthetic language that foregrounds cycles of erosion and renewal, drawing on the shifting behaviours and adaptive processes of ecological systems, geological processes and emotional terrains. Impermanence and disintegration are not treated as decline but as generative states of transformation, vulnerability, and resilience.
Barnes’ installations often operate as temporal ecologies, shifting over the duration of an exhibition. Pigment accumulates, erodes, or disperses; clay reveals its internal strata; suspended forms shift with changes in humidity or airflow. These systems draw on ecological consciousness and biomimetic observations—such as the architectures of mud wasps, the behaviour of sedimentary deposits, or the subtle interactions between matter and atmosphere.
Collaboration, co-creation and responsiveness to place remain central to her methodology. Many works are shaped through collective gestures, embodied encounters with materials and participatory frameworks, particularly within post-crisis or disaster-impacted environments. Here, material processes become tools for reconnection, reflection and communal repair.
From 2009 to 2019, Barnes co-directed the Imagine the Land Project, creating participatory, land-based installations from soil pigments gathered at disturbed ecological sites. Presentations included Te Uru (Auckland), The Wellington Museum of Earth and Sea, the Bhoomi Festival (New Delhi) and the Casa Museo Antonio Nariño (Colombia), fostering community-led ecological reflection.
Her broader practice is informed by her work as a qualified art therapist specialising in adolescent mental health, trauma recovery and brain injury. She has contributed significantly to creative recovery efforts following major natural disasters, including the largest flood in modern Australian history, and has delivered extensive youth arts and wellbeing programs across Northern NSW. Her experience also spans post-conflict and remote communities across Timor Leste, India and Indigenous Australia.
At its core, Barnes’ practice investigates how individuals and communities are shaped through relationships, particularly at the intersections of nature, culture and crisis. Through temporal systems, relational materiality and atmospheric forms, her installations create spaces for presence, reconfiguration and collective ecological regard.
K A R M A B A R N E S
MA ECAP, Grad.Cert ECAP, BA Art & Creativity.
Professional Registration ANZACATA
Image: Yaka Adamic
Karma Barnes – Artist Statement 2026
My practice operates at the intersection of installation, material inquiry and participatory methodologies. I work across sculptural forms, suspended arrangements and immersive spatial systems that explore instability, transformation and interdependence. Through material accumulation, suspended compositions and time-based processes, I construct works that shift, erode and evolve over time, examining relationships between human, material and ecological systems.
Influenced by ecological thinking, biomimicry and new materialist philosophy, I approach materials as active and relational rather than inert substances. Observation of natural systems strongly informs my work, particularly biomorphic forms, geological processes and elemental change. Through suspended forms, shifting sediments and immersive spatial compositions, I explore how social and ecological systems remain interconnected through continual states of movement, erosion and accumulation.
Relational exchange, spatial responsiveness and process-led collaboration are embedded within my methodology. Many projects unfold through co-creative and site-attuned processes that invite audiences into shared reflection and meaning-making. I am interested in creating environments that slow perception and generate spaces for sensing, witnessing and reconsidering our entanglement with the more-than-human world.
At its core, my practice reflects on how individuals and communities are shaped through relationships with material ecologies, landscapes and each other. Through temporal systems and immersive forms, I seek to create works that hold space for vulnerability, transformation and collective regard, while reflecting on our position within larger cosmological systems shaped by deep time, elemental forces and continual states of emergence and collapse.