Pippa's Stone Origin Story

Like many children, I loved stones when I was a child. I don’t know what primal, universal fascination children have with rocks, but I suspect it’s something to do with the solidness, the stillness, the kind of unchanging nature of them. I picked up a stone off the beach in Corfu when I was about eight years old, I’ve had it with me ever since – later I wrapped it in gold. There is something inexplicable about this beach pebble that I love, and it’s stayed with me all my life.  

My journey with stones began with me carrying stones around in my pockets all the time. I got a drill, which was revolutionary for me, and I was able to drill holes into stones – which I spent hours doing. This enabled me to wear them, which was incredibly exciting and life changing. I don’t know what it is with stones, holding them in your hands, stones are storytellers that tell us of their journey from the core and crust of our planet. The kind of relationship they have with the energies and movements, the heat, the cold, the sand, the wind that create and form their shapes – I think you can just feel all of that in a rock. There is something incredibly reassuring and grounding, literally, in a stone.  

I’ve worked now with Om Prakash who’s a stone cutter in Jaipur, and his family, for over twenty years. He’s someone who, I’ll come to his workshop and sit with all the stonecutters, and I’ll bring a seed or a shape and think: this is incredibly exciting! They’ll all study the shape I bring, and they’ll recreate it in rock. It takes the essence of a natural stone with a river or ocean tumbled feel and recreate that feeling.  

Stones matter to me because they come from the earth, they’re part of the earth, and I think that it’s incredibly powerful to wear that next to the skin, on the body.