Josh Simpson '72 was recently featured in an Associated Press article about his personal never-ending mission called the "Infinity Project." Simpson, who blows glass in his own studio in western Massachusetts, places planet-like glass orbs with the infinity symbol, a sideways number eight, all over the world.
Simpson originally had the idea for this project when he dug up a few glass marbles in his yard that he figured were buried or lost by children who used to live there. "That made me think about the longevity of glass," Simpson said of finding the marbles. "It gave me the sense that something I make today will likely outlive me."
The AP article said that Simpson enlists friends, relatives and customers to deposit his golf ball-sized globes everywhere from the Great Wall of China to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. They've been left on Mt. Fuji and tossed into the Black Sea, abandoned under Chicago bridges and dropped into outhouse toilet pits. People have taken the globes to places as remote as the South Pole, exotic as Machu Picchu and mundane as some train tracks in Atlanta.
Simpson's idea is to puzzle people who find them and make sure he leaves a mark, even if that mark isn't traced to him. Instead of his name, Simpson signs the small spheres with the infinity symbol.
"If archaeologists start finding these things all over the world in a few hundred years, they'll never know it's me," Simpson said. "It would just be this curious and wonderful thing devoid of ego, money or anything else."
Using techniques that essentially sandwich pieces of crushed, shaped, and colored glass between layers of clear glass, Simpson was able to create orbs that seem to contain oceans and land masses. He began adding more forms and experimenting with different styles that gave the planets stars and orbiting space ships.
Simpson is an accomplished glass artist, whose pieces range in price from $35 to the tens of thousands, and is just finishing a $60,000 commission for the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. In the 1970s, he was asked to produce a set of glasses for the Carter White House. Besides the planets, he also makes functional pieces, like vases, platters and bowls, and he's created a glass compound that replicates the look of a meteorite.
-- by Molly Kane '09
