Charis Judith Presents We Are Being Carried Somewhere in Berlin

Charis Judith presents We Are Being Carried Somewhere, a solo studio exhibition in Berlin, on view June 12 and 13, 2026.

Charis Judith works across marble, bronze and glass in a slow, physical process that treats carving and casting as forms of ritual rather than technique.

We Are Being Carried Somewhere, shown across two days in her Berlin studio this June, gathers four marble sculptures, two wall-mounted bronze pieces and a glass head developed from dream imagery and fragments of perception.

What follows is journalist David Sharp's account of an afternoon spent with the artist in her Schöneberg studio, ahead of the show.

WE ARE BEING CARRIED SOMEWHERE
by David Sharp

"I do feel like I'm performing some sort of ritualistic dance when I'm working," says Charis. It's no surprise to learn that in her Australian youth she was part of a performing arts group - she moves around her Berlin studio with a lissom grace.

You have to be light on your toes, and with your tools, to commune with rough-hewn blocks of marble. And this is no ordinary stone – it's statuario offcuts of Carrara marble excavated from the same place where Michaelangelo unearthed his David, the Fantiscritti quarries in Miseglia, Italy.

The artist spent time in Pietrasanta - a stone's throw from Miseglia - under the tutelage of an American artisan, Kyle Smith, who schooled her in foundational methods that date back to the Old Masters. She is happy to be in dialogue with this historical lineage.

A simple preliminary charcoal sketch on paper and off she goes, in the practice of distilling her subjects to their essential elements. The simplification of form and the suppression of details become a source of ambiguity, sculptural abstraction, allowing the viewer to formulate their own meaning, project their own experiences of memory and language onto the works.

Charis invites me to take a seat and suddenly, without ceremony, passes a marble shape into my hands, smooth as a pebble with the heft of a ten-pin bowling ball. It nestles in my lap and I am instantly compelled to stroke it, like a little pet. The silken surface belies the fact that it's been buffed and polished by human hands. It's as if it's been smoothed over a period of centuries by the ebb and flow of the sea. "It shouldn't be machined.

I'm looking for something that feels like human skin," she says. A rough ridge, the raphe of the seed, dissects the sculpture and I run my finger along it, as you would trace a line on a lover's face in still, silent reflection. This is her 2024 piece, Seed. It's quite clearly a seed but its stylised, highly polished surface is reduced to its intrinsic components, reminiscent of archaic sculptures, holy relics. Her works evoke a timeless quality.

She describes her idyllic outdoor studio, a separate space from the indoor city atelier where we meet, with a sense of awe. Enveloped in a lush canopy of trees, early morning light floods the natural stage – furnished with a rudimentary table and whichever work is in progress – and birdsong fills the air.

"I can't do this kind of work inside," she says. When working, she circles the marble stone on the table for a long time, like a meditative dance, a form of worship, as if to achieve spiritual union, before making a single pencil mark or using a tool, on the stone. "I find myself almost brought to tears at times," she whispers.

The newer sculptures, featured in this exhibition – four of marble, two small, wall-mounted bronze pieces and a glass head – have been informed by dreams, resulting in challenging shapes that somehow resemble more human, fluid, forms. Is the long, elegant, impossibly-romantic-looking stem with the floral tip reaching for the heavens?

These sculptures emerge from a simple yet profound observation: between perception and understanding there is a gap. An interruption. A brief interval where the world stops demanding quick answers. One is simply staying with the work, allowing a quieted mind to stop organizing the visual field into categories. In this tantalising micro-moment of perception, I experienced a strange kind of synesthesia. Looking at the chiseled carvings and polished surfaces of the marble triggered a physical sensation on my own skin. I could feel the imagined coldness, softness, and weight of the stone on my own body.

Charis' work issues a gentle command to the observer for peace and stillness. She says we don't think anymore: "Pause. Pause and contemplate." Is this the somewhere she wishes to carry us to? A place where we can establish meaning for ourselves, unplugged from the white noise and incessant digital distractions of 21st century life – a return to the garden? Through touch, through form, through space, memory, dreams, relationships, through the soil. Recent readings of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl – the father of phenomenology - and the distinction between a lived experience and a reflective awareness, have also been crucial to the slow-burning genesis of these quite beautiful sculptures.

"It's symbolic of those moments in life – especially modern life - when you're lost in a beautiful train of thought and then suddenly the world snaps you back to reality and you can't quite return to that beautiful train of thought. It's gone. That's the interruption," she explains.

Our chat covers a wide range of topics – her fascination with birds, "messengers from above", and how when we're thinking we unknowingly tilt our heads skyward, towards the sun and stars; the powerful, abiding impact on her personal growth from five years spent as an educator living amongst the Ngarluma People, native to the coastal Pilbara region of north-Western Australia; the deep connection she has with the red dirt of her wild outback childhood; the nauseating artificiality of IKEA objects; her increasing interest in religious symbolism – she shows me a photo from the British Museum of a 1st-2nd century Bronze hand used in the worship of Sabazios, the horseman, the sky-father god of the Phrygians and Thracians…I could go on. In Charis' world, nothing exists in isolation; every object, symbol, and story points beyond itself.

What stays with the account is not the philosophy Charis Judith cites, but the ridge running through Seed, the one detail a visitor is invited to touch rather than read about.

Husserl gives her a vocabulary for the gap between seeing and understanding, but the sculptures do their own explaining, slower and without footnotes. A ten-pin bowling ball's weight of polished stone in someone's lap is already an argument. It just doesn't resolve into a sentence.

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