ABOUT | Charis Judith

Charis Smith is an Australian-born, Berlin-based sculptor and educator whose work explores perception, cognition, and interruption.

Drawing from personal experience, she looks at how we interpret and move through the world.

She is interested in the space between perception and thought, where experience shifts into memory, language, and meaning. Her work engages phenomenological ideas about how looking and thinking overlap.

Her practice explores how meaning is formed through touch, memory, symbolism, dreams, relationships, and the natural world. Through sculpture and material processes, she returns to moments that feel familiar or emotionally charged before they can be fully explained.

Greeting summer with a long awaited studio exhibition.

In preparation for an upcoming studio exhibition.

It’s physical.
My fingertips remember the shape now, learned through repetition across the surface.
And it’s still delightful.

Photo @omri_livne_photography @omrilefou

Summer still life, in the studio garden, 2025

A year and a half in the Schoneberg studio.
@omrilefou

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My mother taught me piano, she would always say Beethoven was the poster boy of classical music, and from as young as around 3, I remember sitting on the bench in front of the keys in the living room.

She studied piano meticulously, receiving strict instruction herself since a young age.
She taught privately, and at home my sister and I were also her pupils.

She taught us with much love and persistence. However, my hands fell flat on the keys, their posture was less than perfect.
I was reminded frequently, and was told to imagine there was a small apple under my palm, in order to achieve the perfect posture.

I moved onto clarinet instead, and never returned to piano again until I was an adult.

My hands have since found their way.

1. A spherical piece that awaits me in the garden. Under the palm of my hand.
2. Plaster cast of Beethovens hands, 1827.

Dancing on the icy breath of a wilderbeast

I’d like to think that of the few dreams I remember, they’d go on to live a life much like this.

A softness can exist in stone
Photo @omri_livne_xyz

Something of a routine.
Oftentimes, I arrive into the garden early in the morning, just to be there alone, with a coffee and my chia seed breakfast.
The birds watch me circling the table far longer than necessary, just to take it all in.

On My Mind – Dreaming

To write about and share dreams is a practice as old as time.
The Babylonians often consulted dream interpreters before priests, believing dreams to be messages from spirits.
Later, philosophers wondered whether dreams were internal visions rather than divine ones.

Be it through obsession or curiosity, my dreams of late have taken on strange shapes—creature-like, with the character and personality of Dali-esque paintings.

Just last week, I experienced a visual aura in both eyes and ended up in hospital, undergoing MRIs in search of answers.

The aura was beautiful, yet alarming. It shifted out of my field of vision after a brief appearance
a character in a story, an unexpected object in a familiar landscape.

And today, on a sofa at an event, a conversation about dreaming without imagery.

It has all been coming back to dreams.

I first realised my love for an abundance of ‚terra incognita‘ a kind of visual vastness when I left home.

I met someone the other day, and our conversation led to a book I read by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an American poet and novelist.

In it, the `overmind’ as H.D. describes it, is a heightened level of consciousness, and it allows humans to move beyond rational thought and ego, entering a state of intuition, vision, and unity with the natural world.

It is in the most unlikely of spaces I find a stillness not dissimilar to home, despite the obvious differences in landscapes.
In these spaces and only with such stillness, do I feel closest to any resemblance of what H.D describes.

1. Judean mountains
2. Notes on thoughts and vision, 1919, H.D
3. Roebourne, Western Australia
4. Iceland
5. Karratha, Western Australia

The studio light is in abundance this spring.
Happy Easter x

It’s been a while

Australia, and all its sights, sounds and smells.

📷 @omri_livne_xyz

Pietrasanta, Italy.
My small obsession with this bulbous one.
I disliked this works curves for so long, they were uncomfortable. I found it hard to be in the presence of.

Now, it’s one of the few sculptures I keep close to me at home. As I read next to the window, my right hand finds a way to trace over it.

When others sit in the same chair, by the window, their hands often find a way too.

Documentation of the period between November and February. The quiet time, the treasured silence and the period where I conserve energy to simply think and observe.

New works are available!

I’m back in the Schoneberg studio far more now the weather is light. I have some finished pieces available for purchase, and plenty of time to talk about summer plans over cups of tea.
With love
Charis

The Greeks tell of Orion looking to the sky for knowledge and becoming a star.
Evolution has seen humans look upwards for survival, and seeking direction.
Today, when thinking, our heads ever so slightly tilt skyward, whether or not knowingly, towards the sun and stars.
With this, the birds who live at these heights and return to the ground are messengers.

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