Karma Barnes

Image: Giorgio Sacher

born. 1979. Tāmaki Makaurau | Aotearoa New Zealand | lives. Bundjalung Country | NSW | Australia

Karma Barnes is an interdisciplinary artist whose international profile has accelerated rapidly in recent years. She is the Grand Prix Winner of the Larnaca Biennale 2025 (Cyprus) for her large-scale suspended installation responding to the curatorial theme Along Lines and Traces. She is currently exhibiting at the Arte Laguna Prize 20th Edition at EKA Tianwu in Shanghai, one of the most significant contemporary art platforms in Asia and has been invited to present a new iteration of her ongoing installation series CO-Lapses at the 10th Beijing Biennale in December 2025.

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 important 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 July 2025. Her installations have also been exhibited at institutions including MACRO Asilo – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Grafton and Lismore Regional Galleries, Form & Concept (Santa Fe) and 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, deepening her exploration of ecological systems and social engagement.

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 (2025)

My practice operates at the intersection of installation, material enquiry, and participatory methodologies. I work across sculptural forms, suspended arrangements of large-scale paintings, and multi-component spatial systems. These works are constructed through iterative processes and grounded in ecological thinking, often incorporating earth pigments, mineral sediments, and time-based actions to evoke both geological duration and socio-environmental precarity.

At the core of my approach is the orchestration of elemental materials—clay, pigment, and sediment—into responsive spatial configurations that expose systems of collapse, resilience, and interdependence. These environments are not static objects but temporal ecologies: they shift, erode, and accumulate, emphasising material agency and the embeddedness of bodies within broader planetary systems.

Influenced by philosophical frameworks such as new materialism and deep ecology, my work considers matter as inherently vibrant and relational, foregrounding the entanglement of human and non-human agencies. These perspectives enable a rethinking of authorship, material responsibility, and the ethics of art-making in times of ecological crisis. The aesthetics of impermanence becomes operative here, foregrounding transience, repetition and entropy as formal strategies.

Relational engagement is an embedded logic within my methodology. I prioritise co-creative processes with local publics, placing emphasis on shared authorship, embodied knowledge, and situated resilience. Rather than approaching art as a discrete object, I consider each work a proposition—an ecology of materials, actions and relations in continual flux.

My installations are propositions for sensing, witnessing, and reconfiguring our entanglement with the more-than-human world. They offer sites where material intelligence and collective inquiry converge, and where art functions as a speculative practice grounded in responsibility, presence, and transformation.