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​Co-Lapses
Arte Laguna Prize 18th & 19th Finalist Exhibition | International Prize of Contemporary Art
Arsenale Nord | Venice | Italy
16th November - 8th December 2024
Karma Barnes 2023-2024
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​​CO-Lapses (2023-24) is Karma Barnes’ sculptural installation bringing together ten elegant, organically-shaped, clay and pigment pods suspended from the ceiling. Each vessel holds fine sand mixed with pigment local to places in Bundjalung Country, Australia, or Venice, Italy. Simultaneously, all ten softly sculpted forms release a slender stream of coloured sand onto the floor, slowly forming ten peaked, miniature mountains, referencing ancient relationships between bodies and the land. The installation as a whole calls to mind the passage of deep time, as well as Earth’s biological and social systems. Co-Lapses poetically reminds us that the interconnectedness of our planet’s inhabitants extends beyond human perception and boundaries, and that our world is co-created, through human-nonhuman and other-than-human relationships.
The artist’s aesthetic choices and textual concerns in Co-Lapses are visually abstracted and beautifully simplified. They embrace the natural world and seek to mirror the essence and vitality of human immersion in nature. Originally, Barnes’ motivation for the work emerged from observing mud wasps building their nests in her studio: the tiny earthen capsules they constructed on walls and ceiling were multi-coloured red and yellow ochred, due to the insects’ taking pigments from her collection. As such, Co-Lapses is a poetic translation of the wasps’ design strategies for protecting the eggs they lay. Here, Barnes’ interest in biomimicry – the practice of translating nature’s strategies into the world of human designs for problem solving, and the creative application of natural systems and processes toward human solutions – comes to the fore. The pods share a material affinity (unanimity) with the earthen pigments falling to the ground, and with the multi-tiered nests built from layered mud by female mud dauber wasps. In a similar sense, considering both micro and macro scales, the iron in our blood is the same element as that bound up in an extra-terrestrial meteorite falling to Earth. Our contemporary understanding of the universe relies upon the identification of the one hundred and eighteen elements of the periodic table. Such material unity informs our sense of wholeness and interconnection. Co-Lapses brings to mind this unity by mirroring the integral, material cohesion of the cosmos.
The installation performs for viewers the rudiments of a symbolic natural system. The pods’ biotic shapes invoke birth, procreation, home, and protection-oriented forms such as seeds, swaddled infants, or inverted hanging birds’ nests. While the pods themselves seem to float (they are hung from clear plastic filament), the work’s central process of falling pigments produces a dialogue with gravity. Yet, Co-Lapses finesses the logical, commonsense view that gravity is “brute fact: the ground, the firm foundation of things [and of] scientific rationality.” Instead, Barnes prefers to stress the gravity “of meaning, language and culture” necessary for making self-organising systems, for creating autopoiesis, and for what develops further into “technologies” of “story-telling and origin-myths” that help us understand who we are as present-day humans working to learn from nature, particularly in light of environmental challenges.
The circular cutouts in each hovering shape serve the utilitarian purpose of access for refilling pigment into the pods. The holes’ presence is head-like, eye-like, implying the source of a gaze, the face of a fundamental intelligence, or perhaps, the void of the unknown. In this manner, Co-Lapses hangs together, and self-defines much like a human society constructs itself through a “complex of origin-narratively encoded socio-technologies.” That is, Co-Lapses embodies the passage of time and ensuing accrual of meaning, appealing to an innate sense of community with all of Earth’s denizens.
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Here, Barnes is influenced by the practice of biomimicry, as set out by biologist Janine Benyus in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
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Ira Livingston, Between Science and Poetry: An Introduction to Autopoetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 149. At page one, Livingston states that “autopoetics [is] the study of ‘self-making’ systems. The more specific term autopoesis was first coined in 1972 by Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana to describe the biological ‘self-making’ of living creatures.”
Livingston, Between Science and Poetry, 2; Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck, eds., Black Knowledges/Black Struggles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 201, n25.
Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 201.
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