Jessie White - Leather Wrapped stone

We first came across a leather-wrapped stone on the desk of the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, in the office of his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was a gift from his student and friend, the Austrian designer Carl Auböck II, who would go on to found the Carl Auböck Werkstätte in Vienna, whence some of the more beautiful objects and curios in existence still emerge today. 

For our first anniversary James gave me (Hugo) a stone from my Skye collection, which he himself had wrapped in leather. It forms part of the personal ephemera that we have on display in amongst our collection at Bard, and no single object has attracted more intrigue and attention as that leather-clad stone. So when the brilliant leather worker Jessie White got in touch out of the blue earlier this year, we asked if she might be interested to wrap some Scottish stones for us in leather. She willingly obliged and presented us with a clutch of beach stones from the Berwickshire coast, tightly wrapped and carefully stitched. Each one has its own personality; each is a work of art, an endlessly satisfying communion of human and nature, mineral and animal. Could there be a truer example of craft’s alchemical power to elevate a humble material into something extraordinary?