Karma Barnes

Image: Giorgio Sacher

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

Karma Barnes is an interdisciplinary artist renowned for her large-scale installations,combining sculptural forms, suspended paintings, and participatory art practices. Her work explores material memory, human perception, and the relationship between temporal and cognitive processes, revealing visual metaphors that underscore the fluidity and impermanence of physical and psychological experience Her work often features collaborative installations that engage the public and use site-responsive materials to bridge connections between land history, human connection, and ecological crises. By employing sustainable materials and earth pigments shaped by natural forces over aeons, she explores the deep-seated ties between people and the land, viewing these materials as palimpsests of Earth’s cycles of life, death, creation, and destruction. Drawing on biomimicry, Karma’s work reveals visual metaphors that underscore the fluidity and impermanence of temporal and cognitive processes, highlighting the interplay between physical and psychological experiences. Against the backdrop of escalating climate crises, her work examines themes of hope, compassion, self-responsibility, and interconnectedness. She seeks to understand how individuals and environments evolve in response to shifting conditions, emphasising the potential for transforming adversity through collective resilience and creative connection.

Karma Barnes is establishing herself as an early-career contemporary artist to watch, with international recognition. Her exhibitions include the Arte Laguna Prize Finalist Exhibition, Venice (2024), Relative Terrains at Grafton & Lismore Regional Galleries, Australia (2023), New Mexico State University Art Museum, USA (2023), and Tocca la Terra at MACRO ASILO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2019). Notably, in 2024, the New Mexico State University Art Museum acquired several of Barnes’s works for their permanent collection, marking her first acquisition by a major art institution and solidifying her place within contemporary art’s institutional landscape.

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 Karma's work has been presented in Italy, Azerbaijan, Cuba and Italy and most notably at the Louvre Museum, France as part of the Year 1: Earthly Paradise exhibition. In 2024 Karma attended the Unidee Residency Program at the Cittadelarte- Fondazione Pisteletto and in 2019 she attended the Terzo Paradiso Panel for the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the MACRO Asilo in Rome. Through her soil and pigment research Karma has collaborated with Vandana Shiva and the Bhoomi Living Soil Project at the Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology & Ecology, New Delhi, India.

Between 2009 and 2019, Karma co-directed the Imagine the Land Project alongside Croatian/New Zealand artist Ekarasa Doblanovic. The project aimed to foster connections among people, art, and nature by employing participatory arts practices and creating temporary land-based installations. The work and research of the Imagine the Land Project specifically centred on site-specific art installations produced from soil pigments and minerals sourced from local terrains and pre-disturbed sites.

The project's methodology emphasised community engagement, connection to place, and collective ontologies of the land. It addressed critical relationships within the local and global environment while endeavouring to cultivate compassionate connections between participants and their surroundings. The project provided participants with an opportunity for a direct tactile, sensory, and conceptual response to nature, impermanence, and interconnectedness, with the soil serving as the medium, catalyst, and messenger. In collaboration with art partners and communities, the project's extensive exhibitions and presentations have included Te Uru - West Auckland Regional Gallery (New Zealand 2014, 2017), The Bhoomi Festival (New Delhi, 2015), Wellington Museum of Land and Sea (2011) and The Villa de Leyva Museum (Colombia, 2010).

Karma is a qualified art therapist specialising in acute mental health, trauma recovery, and brain injury. Her professional practice has played a pivotal role in community response and recovery during a series of significant natural disasters over a four-year period, including the largest flood event in modern Australian history affecting the Northern Rivers region.

Demonstrating a deep commitment to nurturing the arts in future generations, Karma has dedicated the past 12 years to overseeing youth arts mentoring projects throughout the Northern Rivers. Moreover, she has garnered extensive experience working in post-occupied and developing countries, including Timor Leste, India, and Indigenous communities across Australia.

Karma's practice focuses on how individuals are shaped by their relationships, particularly at the intersections of nature and culture. Her exploration is driven by a profound interest in the perpetual cycles of life and death, creation and destruction. Furthermore, Karma endeavours to comprehend how our internal and external experiences, coupled with various elements and the transient nature of existence, contribute to personal understanding and transformation.

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.