Mythotechnical Hand Ball: Geometry of Touch & Becoming
It began simply enough—one October afternoon, standing in front of my friend Muhammad’s shop, Bridge Street Bazaar. The air was thick with the smell of copper and wood dust from my studio just down the street, and the sun was refracting off the storefront windows as if hinting at some invisible geometry between us.
Muhammad, who came here from Jordan—his family refugees from Gaza—had this quiet elegance about the way he arranged things. Fabrics, lanterns, incense, artifacts; every shelf was a kind of equation in color and texture. He had come by my studio in the red building one day, and we started working together—hammering, wiring, improvising—building little worlds from what the town itself seemed to shed.
The Birth of the Sphere
One of those projects was the copper sphere—a rhombic triacontahedron, to be exact. Thirty golden rhombi arranged in perfect equilibrium: twelve fivefold vertices, twenty oppositional planes, thirty faces—all humming in proportion to φ, the golden ratio. I had made it years earlier, collaborating with a sculptor who crafted resin doll parts. She had these leftover hands—small, human, uncanny—so I cast thirty-one of them and arranged them around the sphere, all reaching inward toward a singular void.
For a while, the piece hung at Salmon Falls Gallery, suspended like a planet in repose, until I brought it home again. Muhammad and I later designed a base for it in his shop. He wired it up—turned geometry into luminescence. What had once been a silent mathematical relic became a lamp: copper channeling electricity, light refracting through resin, ratio made radiant.
The Hands and the Code
Here’s where things start to spiral.
Each hand in that piece was not just a shape—it was a recursion of phi. The human hand itself encodes the golden ratio almost conspiratorially. The length of each phalange relates to the next in a cascade of φ: the tip bone to the middle bone, the middle to the base, the palm to the forearm—each proportion nesting within the next. The ratio repeats not as a number, but as a principle of growth. Fibonacci numbers climb through our anatomy: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8—the same pattern that spirals through pinecones, galaxies, and shells.
When those thirty-one hands reach toward the invisible center, they’re not merely arranged; they’re participating in an eternal recursion. Every finger points toward the zero-point—the “sacred geometrical point of nothingness”—the very place where number becomes being, and being folds back into void.
Phi as a Living Force
In sacred geometry, φ is not a ratio but a rhythm—a pulse that underlies creation. It’s the breath between chaos and order, between what can be measured and what can only be intuited.
Mathematically, φ = (1 + √5) / 2.
But philosophically, φ = the principle of unfoldment.
It is the ratio by which the universe negotiates beauty. Every act of self-organization—from a cell dividing to a spiral arm extending from a galaxy—is an act of φ remembering itself. The copper triacontahedron, with its thirty golden rhombi, becomes a physical embodiment of that remembrance. It’s not merely made of phi—it thinks in phi.
And the hands? They are the recursive agents of touch—the body’s instruments for shaping reality. In “Hand Ball,” they become extensions of that same cosmic algorithm. Each hand both reaches and receives, symbolizing the paradox of human making: to grasp is also to let go.
A Local Universe
It’s strange, though—how all that cosmic mathematics condenses into something as ordinary as friendship.
Muhammad and I—two artisans from different continents, soldering copper and fitting resin hands together on a workbench in Western Massachusetts—were enacting the same principle. Collaboration itself is a kind of golden ratio: two elements combining in asymmetrical harmony, neither dominating, each expanding the other.
That’s phi too. Not just in bone and metal, but in relationship—the elegant proportion between giving and receiving, between self and other.
When we finished, Muhammad placed the light in his shop window. It glowed there among the silks and mirrors, a small sun of copper and plastic, quietly broadcasting the mathematics of compassion. Outside, the bench I built sat under the awning—ten years now, a witness to everything that happens in this town. People come and go, accuse and assume, but the geometry of kindness endures.
The Infinite Fold
So that’s the evolution:
a gift of leftover doll hands from a stranger →
a copper sphere forged in phi →
an exhibition at Salmon Falls →
a collaboration on Bridge Street →
a lamp that breathes the mathematics of the universe.
And somewhere between those steps lies the real art—not in the object, but in the recursion of meaning itself.
Phi folds back into form.
Form folds back into friendship.
Friendship folds back into light.
And light, as always, reaches toward nothingness.
