​

​

Karma Barnes is a New Zealand artist, based on Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers, NSW, Australia.  Her creative practice encompasses installation art, painting, participatory and social-impact practices, community and street art. Engagement and participation are integral to her work, and drawing on large numbers of people to collaborate on colossal scale projects is her passion. She graduated in 2014 with a Masters Degree in Creative and Expressive Arts Practice and 2009 with a Bachelors Degree of Art and Creativity.

​

Karma co-directs the Imagine the Land Project which cultivates relationships between people, art and nature through creating works from soils and natural pigments. The project has engaged over 10,000 people in collaborative art-making through public art exhibitions producing large scale site-specifc installations. Projects have included; MACRO Asilo - The Rome Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), Te Uru - West Auckland Regional Gallery (NZ 2016, 2014), YWCA National Child Protection Launch (NSW, 2016) The Bhoomi Festival (New Delhi, 2015), The Wallace Gallery (New Zealand 2012), The Wellington Museum of Land & Sea (New Zealand 2011) and The Villa de Leyva Museum (Colombia 2010).

​

Karma's work examines how we are formed and informed by relationships through the intersections of nature and culture. Karma's work is inspired by her deep fascination with the endless cycles of life and death, creation and destruction and how we are shaped and changed by our internal and external experiences, elements and impermanence.

 

Karma is a professionally registered ANZACATA Art Therapist, project director and community arts facilitator. She has extensive experience working with a diverse range of populations including youth, women’s groups, Indigenous and cultural groups and communities with special needs. Karma has worked with peek community social and health organisations throughout the Northern Rivers bridging the personal, social and ecological. She has been directing the award-winning <In.scribe> Youth Arts Mentoring Project since 2013. The project has produced public artworks across the Northern Rivers including the regions largest youth artwork; an 80-meter mural. The project has produced projects with NGO's and communities in the Northern Territory, Timor Leste and India.

​

​

​