ARTTYCO TALKS
Karma invites us into living ecosystems of grief and renewal—where natural materials, pigment, and time coalesce into immersive spaces for reflection, healing, and transformation.
ARTTYCO TALKS | August 16, 2025.
EPISODE #7: KARMA BARNES
1. Your installations function as immersive, living ecosystems shaped by time, erosion, and collective presence. How do you design these evolving environments to reflect material memory and impermanence?
K: My installations are temporal ecosystems, spaces reforming through gravity, entropy, and human encounter. I draw on biomimicry, observing how natural structures adapt and how geological processes imprint memory into matter. Suspended forms slowly release pigments that gather in stratified layers, evoking volcanic and metamorphic histories. Other works explore caldera formations and erosion, mirroring cycles of rupture and regeneration. This material memory, an ancient inheritance within minerals, is both medium and metaphor.
Referencing compounded forces shaping a caldera or pigment drifting over time, these gestures invite viewers to see deep time as an active presence. Impermanence is not just an aesthetic proposition but an ethical stance, acknowledging ecological instability and the impossibility of permanence. Attachment to fixed forms leads to unease and constriction. Designing environments that transform cultivates a contemplative space where visitors witness dissolution and emergence as continuous unfolding, rather than seeking closure or permanence.
2. You integrate themes of environmental grief, trauma-informed frameworks, and collective reflection in your work. How do you balance emotional resonance and ecological urgency in creating spaces for witnessing and renewal?
K: My practice is informed by creative recovery within communities affected by climate disruption and ecological upheaval. The work is an urgent gesture, a visual language creating space for reflection and reparation without prescribing resolution. Balancing resonance and urgency requires humility, allowing complexity without becoming didactic. Rather than presenting crisis as a spectacle of loss, I aim for a receptive atmosphere where viewers encounter sensations of responsibility, agency, or possibility.
I’m drawn to forms and materials that evoke embodied, multisensory awareness, slowing time through durational processes and subtle shifts. These gestures become a way to bear witness, acknowledging rupture and inviting imagining of different futures. Ultimately, the installations model collective presence. They are there to be encountered, accumulating traces of engagement, reminding us that resilience is relational.
3. In works like Co‑Lapses, suspended pods release streams of pigment over time. What does this slow, durational process reveal about collapse, regeneration, or the unfolding of geological time?
K: The durational release of pigment in Co-Lapses is a material analogy for the nonlinearity of collapse. Though the word suggests an instantaneous event, most collapses, ecological, social, and psychological, unfold gradually, often invisibly. As pigments descend, they form topographies speaking to sedimentation, accretion, and erosion. Time becomes sculptural, revealing and obscuring form. I’m interested in how this slow unfolding embodies natural systems’ regenerative capacities. The installation doesn’t end in destruction; it continually reorganises, producing emergent landscapes referencing decay and renewal. The prefix co- is essential—co-creation, co-habitation, co-responsibility. Witnessing these transformations reminds participants of our interconnectedness and how our actions, however imperceptible, leave lasting impressions in the collective substrate.
4. Your practice emphasises both site-responsiveness and participatory engagement. How do local ecosystems and community interactions inform the form and meaning of your installations?
K: Every site holds layered ecological and cultural narratives. I approach installation as an adaptive process shaped by ecological frameworks recognising all living systems’ interdependence. My work reflects climate disruption’s impact and proposes spaces for resolve, repair, and imaginative diversion from disaster cycles. Participatory engagement enacts solidarity across species and perspectives. Inviting diverse forms of presence allows installations to evolve as shared ecosystems rather than static displays. Meaning emerges through collective stewardship, where the work becomes a provisional commons for experimentation and renewed relationship. I’m interested in site-responsiveness generating solution-based practices that foreground reciprocity, care, and reimagining our entanglement with ecological processes. Engagement extends this responsiveness by allowing collective presence to become part of the form. Communities process materials, share stories, or contribute gestures leaving tangible traces. Meaning emerges as evolving negotiation, not a fixed proposition.
5. Your work often draws on natural systems and materials that evolve over time. How do you approach working with nature rather than simply representing it?
K: I see my practice as a conversation with material agencies, collaborating with nature rather than depicting it. The work enacts ecological processes rather than illustrating them. This requires openness to contingency, letting gravity and time co-author outcomes. Materials are not passive; they hold their own logics and temporalities.
Earth pigments are more than colour, they are bodies of memory carrying tectonic histories. I think of this as reciprocal choreography of materiality, where each gesture participates in the micro-macro continuum. Each grain of sand reflects vast planetary processes; each installation becomes a fragment in a larger ecology of becoming. My upbringing in Aotearoa New Zealand and life in Northern Rivers, Australia, have shaped this view. Moving between these landscapes taught me that inhabiting the world responsibly means acknowledging its mutable, relational character.
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