Press
What's being said about us.
We had the good fortune of connecting with Caroline PM Jones and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Caroline PM, can you talk to us a bit about the social impact of your business?
The precepts of my business are Fine Art Memorials, land conservation and Digital Immortality. Digital & Stone’s vision is to connect the souls of both the living and the dead, through preserving the memory not the body. The Fine Art Memorials connect artists, and artistic and historic principals to our ancestors, and to those we love. Ive recently been reading and looking at Carl Jung’s writings and art work and to him all art was religious expression. The word religion comes from the latin Religaris – to reconnect. It is my intention that through artistic memorials we can help the community and our fellow man through grief, and misunderstanding by connecting to the continuity of life beyond birth and death. As Buckminster Fuller says, ” You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”. The time for preserving the land is now, the time for environmentally friendly and sustainable practices is now. By changing the burial model that exists today and promoting and offering a green alternative, we hope to link sustainable practice, regeneration of the land and eternal legacy. The company is being built with three interconnected circles that support Digital Immortality – building a memorial for yourself or others through our Digital Immortality platform, Fine Art Memorials – physical memorials with artistic community creating remembrances and support through sculpture to grief ceremonies, and Land Conservation – green belt acquisition by using the land trust alliance, carbon neutrality and working with the Green burial association to offer an alternative to how and where you are buried and how and where your legacy can be accessed. The meaning of Life and Death is the unifying principal of all art.
Can you open up a bit about your work and career?
We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work. I have been an artist/painter/sculptor for most of my life-always drawing and making things outside in nature for as long as I can remember. I began painting in the streets of Gibraltar to gain my independence as a person, and shortly after I moved into Spain and began a lifelong career and pursuit as an artist. From Spain I moved to Asia, setting up a studio in Hong Kong for over ten years. I used it as a spring board to remote areas of China and the Himalayan region, where I travelled on that esoteric bridge discovering the meaning of life and death through the unifying principal of art. Always against a back drop of commerce & business, birth and death, my endless journeys culminated in multiple series of works from the Tales of Peking Opera and the dancing monks of Bhutan to Pool portraits of my children in the California light and the rock formations of the Mojave. My most recent work is based on landscapes of the mind, dreamscapes and Chinese scholar stones – monolithic forms much like totems and monuments that ground what is above with what is below. I feel dreams and dream time is like the living evidence of our consciousness and it is the desire to encourage others to stay connected to that one consciousness even and especially in the time of loss and death of a loved one that allowed me to create my company Digital & Stone.
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Joshua Tree National park for some natural jurassic wonder and pioneer spirit of early America. The Griffith Observatory for some classic LA parks, recreation and iconic architecture, and of course to put us in celestial perspective. If we were lucky we would go to a concert at the Greek Theatre on our way down the hill – if not there, then the Hollywood Bowl for live music, communal conviviality and the general excitement of Hollywood. Not that Ive done it but I keep meaning to – watch a movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery – I have three monuments there and quite a few friends. If it was now, I’d take out Thai at Choladas on PCH by Topanga Canyon Blvd and walk under the underpass onto Topanga State beach at sunset and low tide. Or do fish tacos at Cafe Habana in Malibu and walk around the lagoon. I have so many favorite walks from point Dume to the hills off my mountain on Saddle Peak which is often sitting above the clouds. We are incredibly lucky to experience the beauty of nature it is our duty to preserve it and honor it and share it with the generations to come. Who else deserves some credit and recognition? My paternal grandmother was very influential in her own way in my youth. She was strong, elegant, independent, worldly, and handled our generational differences with determination. She lived on her own with her two dogs, in a large eight bedroom house, on the the outskirts of the seaside town of Bournemouth England. She was artistic, loved to garden, and she admired animals for their beauty and intelligence. She was my greatest companion and escape during my teenage years and education, and was the place I was allowed to go as my parents were so often not in the country. My Elementary Boarding School – “Leaden Hall”, in Salisbury Wiltshire (UK). Although I was, like many, very young when I was sent there, it was an incredibly magical place, and run by a wonderful headmistress who would treat her young boarders like chicks, gathering us at her skirt hem for crafting while she read to us at night. Salisbury is in an ancient part of England with places of ancestral worship in many forms. From the great Salisbury Cathedral of the 1200’s (the shadow of which fell upon our school grounds), to Stonehenge built between the Neolithic period of 3000BCE to 1500BCE in the bronze age. We ran around such places with all the excitement and wonder living history can divine. All the creatives that have dedicated their life to their art – they are an eternal wellspring of inspiration. My kids, because I just love them so much, although Teenagers now, I could not be more grateful to share their life with them.