CO-Lapses
Karma Barnes, 2023–2025
CO-Lapses is a sculptural installation series by Karma Barnes, unfolding across multiple iterations between 2023 and 2025. The work brings together a constellation of organically shaped pigment and clay pods suspended from the ceiling, each containing fine sand mixed with earth pigments gathered from distinct geographies. From these vessels, slender streams of coloured particles fall continuously to the ground, forming accumulative topographies—miniature mountains that evoke ancient relationships between bodies and the land.
Across its evolving forms, CO-Lapses takes the form of a refuge - a sculptural environment that overcomes obstacles and mountains, transmuting and harmonising connections between people, places and cultures. In this sense, each iteration becomes a space of transformation and collective resonance, where materials and gestures trace the porous relationships between ecological, emotional and cultural terrains.
The work reflects on the passage of deep time, tracing the entanglement of biological and social systems. It gestures toward the interdependence of the planet’s inhabitants and the continuity between human and nonhuman worlds. The environment is not fixed but a co-created field where matter, memory and meaning continually reform one another.
The work’s genesis lies in Barnes’ observation of mud wasps nesting in her studio. Their small ochred capsules—constructed from pigments drawn from her own collection—became a catalyst for translating natural design strategies into human-scale sculptural language. Biomimicry here is both process and poetics, expressing reverence for the intelligence of natural systems and their capacity to model resilience, adaptation and protection.
Materially and conceptually, CO-Lapses mirrors the unity of all matter. The same mineral elements that constitute the pigments of the earth circulate within human bodies and celestial dust—the iron in our blood bound to the iron in meteorite fragments that fall to Earth. This shared materiality becomes a framework for understanding the cosmos as a continuous field of relation and transformation.
The suspended forms suggest seeds, cocoons or nests—symbols of shelter, gestation and renewal. Their gradual dispersal of pigment engages gravity as both physical and metaphorical force, a choreography of erosion and emergence that challenges ideas of permanence and control.
Through this slow release, CO-Lapses performs a meditation on time, ecology and coexistence. It invites viewers to witness the quiet dialogue between matter and becoming—to recognise the deep interconnection that binds all things within the living body of the planet.
Note that the current Co-Lapses (Refuge Iteration 2025) is currently on exhibition at the Arte Laguna Shanghai can be commissioned for installation by the artists, rate negotiable but project.
