born. 1979. Tāmaki Makaurau | Aotearoa New Zealand | lives. Bundjalung Country | NSW | Australia
Karma Barnes is an interdisciplinary artist based between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, working across large-scale installation, sculpture and painting. Her practice has been presented internationally across Europe, Asia and Australasia and has received significant recognition, including the Grand Prix at the Larnaca Biennale 2025 (Cyprus) for CO-Lapses, a large-scale suspended installation responding to the curatorial theme Along Lines and Traces. In 2026, Barnes 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 the city’s leading contemporary cultural destinations.
Selected by curator Sir Huang Yi, Barnes represented New Zealand earlier this year at the 10th Beijing International Art Biennale (2025–2026), as the sole New Zealand artist and 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 in Skopje, North Macedonia.
In 2024, Barnes' CO-Lapses was selected as a finalist in the Arte Laguna Prize 18th Edition 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 (Italy), Grafton Regional Gallery, Lismore Regional Gallery (Australia), Form & Concept (Santa Fe, USA), and the NMSU Art Museum (New Mexico, USA).
Barnes is an Ambassador for the Terzo Paradiso Rebirth-day Project, founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto, with related presentations in Italy, Azerbaijan, Cuba and 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. Shifting sediments, falling pigments and incremental transformations become temporal markers within durational environments. Through these conditions, Barnes creates spaces of embodied attention. Her work encourages 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 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 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
Nothing exists in isolation or remains unchanged. Form emerges through conditions, persists momentarily, and passes into other states. My practice begins within this continual process of becoming, where human experience, ecological systems and the material world are understood not as separate entities, but as interdependent and perpetually forming one another.
Working across installation, sculpture and expanded painting, I create suspended architectures, durational processes and immersive environments that accumulate, erode, fracture and re-form over time. I am interested in how form arises through relationships between gravity, material, environmental conditions and duration.
Biomimicry provides an important structural and conceptual language within my practice. Drawing from architectures, patterns and adaptive systems found in the natural world, I explore processes of formation, adaptation and change. These observations inform an evolving visual language that moves between organic and architectural forms, examining interdependence, vulnerability and the shifting states between stability and collapse.
Suspension similarly operates as both a physical condition and conceptual state. Forms occupy transitional spaces where gravity, shadow, movement and surrounding architecture remain active. Site-responsive processes extend these relationships through locally sourced elements, spatial configurations and the specific ecological, geological and cultural conditions of place.
Earth, clay, mineral pigments, sand, charcoal and sediment carry histories of place and capacities for change. Through accumulation, suspension, sedimentation and erosion, these elements shift between states, allowing form to emerge through an exchange between artistic intention, site and time.
Participatory and relational methodologies form a parallel strand of my practice. Through socially engaged and co-creative processes, I explore how individual actions and experiences can accumulate into shared forms. These encounters create spaces for exchange, reflection and collective meaning-making, extending my broader inquiry into interconnected systems.
Underlying my practice is an ongoing inquiry into impermanence, interdependence and transformation. I am interested in collapse not simply as destruction, but as a generative condition through which existing structures disperse, recombine and give rise to new formations. Moving between intimate biological systems and the expanded temporalities of climatic processes, geological formation and deep time, my work considers human experience as part of a much larger, continually evolving field of relations.