[1] Her mature work draws on archival images, alternative histories and the legacy of her maternal grandfather, the Egyptian Romantic poet, bee scientist and polymath Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi.

[14] From 2005 to 2016, she was the Arts Editor at Cultural Politics,[15] a scholarly journal published by Duke University Press that features in each issue an essay written by a visual artist about their work.

She returned to New York in 1987 and worked at Watanabe Studio, Ltd.[28] in Brooklyn, NY, producing limited edition prints for Sol LeWitt, Sue Coe and others.

In 1999, Debs & Co. gallery, NY, gave Garnett her first solo exhibition, "Buster-Jangle", which consisted of paintings based on photos and film stills of atomic bomb tests from the 1950s released in 1990–91 by the US government under the Freedom of Information Act.

Garnett attempted to reveal the information and hegemonic coding within these images to “establish a context where art, science and government are presented as interlocking and overlapping areas.”[31] After its launch in 2000, "The Bomb Project" was expanded to include still and moving declassified imagery, primary source documents, links to current events and news articles.

Garnett explored the problem of the found object by re-mediating and transforming the image of a documentary/technical photograph by painting it (ca.1997-2018), shifting its context and opening it up for multiple interpretations by the viewer, consistent with the conventions of visual art.

[33] Garnett's 2004 exhibition "Riot" featured a series of paintings based on images pulled from mass media sources, depicting figures in "extreme emotional states.

"[34] The painting entitled "Molotov" was sourced from a jpeg found on the Internet that was later discovered to be a fragment of a larger photograph[35] taken by Susan Meiselas during the Sandinista Revolution (1979).