Karma Barnes

Image: Giorgio Sacher

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

Karma Barnes is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, suspended painting, and participatory methodologies. Her practice engages intimately with materials such as raw pigments, clay, ash, and sediment, processed through evolving, site-responsive approaches that foreground impermanence, disintegration, and ecological sensitivity. Grounded in environmental inquiry and material responsiveness, Barnes explores how matter holds memory and registers transformation across time.

A defining feature of her practice is the construction of suspended paintings and sculptural configurations within atmospheric spatial systems. These installations incorporate pigment-laden surfaces and suspended forms that respond to light, air, and movement, inviting slow transformation through atmospheric and gravitational forces. Light plays an active role, casting transitional shadows and marking subtle temporal shifts. Her works unfold as durational environments that invite embodied attention and contemplative engagement.

Influenced by ecological theory, biomimicry, and new materialist philosophy, Barnes treats substances as responsive and relational, positioning matter as a co-agent in the formation of meaning. Her installations trace cycles of fragmentation and renewal, echoing the recursive patterns of ecological systems and emotional experience. Collaboration and co-creation are central to her methodology, often involving embodied encounters with materials, collective gestures, and site-specific dialogue. Within post-crisis and disaster-impacted contexts, her participatory frameworks become tools for reconnection, reflection, and repair.

Barnes is gaining international recognition as a contemporary artist to watch. In 2024, her sculptural installation 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 acquired two significant works from her Relative Terrains series. These pieces confront the social impacts of compounded climatic events in Bundjalung Country, Northern Rivers, NSW, marking a pivotal moment in Barnes' career and signifying her recognition by a major art institution. One of these works will be exhibited in CRUCES: New Acquisitions from the NMSU Permanent Art Collection at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in July 2025.

In October 2025, Barnes will represent Aotearoa New Zealand at the Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus, presenting a large-scale suspended durational installation that responds to the biennale’s theme, Along Line and Traces.

Her installations have also been exhibited at MACRO Asilo – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, including the 2019 site-specific installation Tocca la Terra, developed in collaboration with Ekarasa Doblanovic and curated by Giorgio de Finis. This work transformed the space into a living field of collective action, exploring ecological consciousness and material ritual through socially engaged practice. Additional recent exhibitions include Grafton and Lismore Regional Galleries (2023) and the Wild Pigment Project at Form & Concept, Santa Fe and NMSU Art Museum (2022–2023).

Karma is an ambassador for the Terzo Paradiso Rebirth-day Project – an international arts collaboration with the founder of the Arte Povera movement, Michelangelo Pistoletto. Under the project, her work has been presented in Italy, Azerbaijan, and Cuba, and most notably at the Louvre Museum, France, as part of the Year 1: Earthly Paradise exhibition. In 2024, Barnes participated in the UNIDEE Residency Program at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, and in 2019, she was invited to speak at the Terzo Paradiso Panel for the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at MACRO Asilo in Rome. Through her ongoing pigment and soil research, she has collaborated with Vandana Shiva and the Bhoomi Living Soil Project at the Navdanya Research Foundation in New Delhi, India.

Between 2009 and 2019, Barnes co-directed the Imagine the Land Project with artist Ekarasa Doblanovic. The project employed participatory art practices and temporary land-based installations made from soil pigments and minerals collected from disturbed sites. It emphasised community engagement, place-based knowledge, and collective ecological reflection. Presentations included Te Uru (Auckland), the Bhoomi Festival (New Delhi), and the Villa de Leyva Museum (Colombia).

Her broader practice is informed by her work as a qualified art therapist specialising in adolescent mental health, trauma recovery, and brain injury. Barnes has contributed to creative recovery efforts following several natural disasters, including supporting communities affected by the largest flood in modern Australian history in the Northern Rivers region. She has delivered over a decade of youth arts mentorship programs across Northern NSW and brings extensive experience working in post-conflict and remote communities, including Timor Leste, India, and Indigenous Australia.

At its core, Barnes’s practice investigates how individuals are shaped through relationships, particularly at the intersections of nature, culture, and crisis. Her installations operate as temporal systems where form, light, and material converge to foster spaces of presence, reconfiguration, and collective reflection.

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.