Karma M
Barnes

Karma Barnes is an interdisciplinary artist born in Tāmaki-Makaurau, New Zealand, based on Bundjalung Country, Australia. Her practice encompasses large-scale installations, painting, and participatory practices. Karma's collaborations focus on engaging communities in examining the critical connections between people and the land during times of crisis and change, engaging over 15,000+ participants in her site-specific works. Karma's practice explores how creativity can aid communities in processing and understanding themselves. She delves into the relationships between nature, culture, and human experiences, drawing inspiration from the cycles of life, death, creation, and destruction. Through primal elements and impermanence, her work investigates how internal and external encounters shape and transform us. Her work has reached a wide audience across Australasia, Europe and the USA, and has most recently been presented at the MACRO ASILO Museum of Contemporary Art Rome and the New Mexico State University Museum.

Karma's practice is strongly informed by collaboration. Her most recent series, "Relative Terrains," has been developed in collaboration with Dutch/New Zealand artist Robèrt Franken. This series explores the significance of collaboration and the transformative influence of connections in our existence. It serves as a stimulus for introspection, prompting us to contemplate the ways in which these external dynamics have reconfigured and altered our internal landscapes and terrains.

Karma co-founded The Imagine The Land Project (est 2009) an international collaboration with Croatian/Italian artist Ekarasa Doblanovic producing large-scale site-specific installations from soil pigments and minerals gathered from pre-disturbed sites to inquire into the collective ontologies of the land. The project 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 Imagine the Lands work has been presented in Azerbaijan, Cuba and Italy and most notably at the Louvre Museum, France as part of the Year 1: Earthly Paradise exhibition. In 2019 the project attended the Terzo Paradiso Panel for the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the MACRO Asilo in Rome.