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Cosmic Bowling
Guernica Editions, Fall 2020
156 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771835374
ISBN10: 1771835370
English, French, Italian, Spanish
Translated from the English
$20.00 Canada, $17.95 US, £11.95 UK
This book is a collaborative work of Ted Goodden's ceramic sculptures and Cornelia Hoogland's poems. Specifically, they are responding through image and text to the 64 hexagrams contained in the ancient book of wisdom, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Cosmic Bowling's calm weather lands in the midst of twitter storms in which everybody wants to start a conversation. Here's a conversation -- facilitated through visual art and poetry -- that's been going on for three millennia, one that asks the perennial question: How should we live now?
At birth we're turned loose into a moving field. / Endless adjustments as we position and reposition / ourselves, like geese in erratic flight // seeking permission to land. The desire to belong, / this flock-movement that so engages. The line drive, when it comes /
at you, hard. The thwack when it hits your glove.
Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden created a complex and layered space of contemplation for their installation, “The Book of Changes: Notes and Gestures.” We are excited to see the translation of this collaborative exhibition into book form—a portable gallery, enfolding the viewer/reader into the resonant spaces of change.
Angela Somerset / Denise Lawson, Co-Curators Comox Valley Art Gallery
In this astonishing book of concise and direct poems, of gorgeous, spare sculptures, the I Ching provides an ambiance in which random moments and thoughts find each other. The on-going interrelationship of poems and photos of sculptures work into a beautiful, realized whole. The human figure is of the earth, as if it has just emerged. Throughout, the sculptures and poems shape a voice of longing and homecoming. “I’m as I know myself to be.”
Patrick Friesen, Outlasting the Weather: New & Selected Poems, 1994-2020
Cosmic Bowling is a wonderful collaboration of two artists at the height of their powers as they joyfully explore art, wisdom, and time. Poems and sculptures dive into flux and flow, flipping between word and image, body and dazzling metaphor, in a form that enacts the core meanings of the I Ching. Visually rich and linguistically marvellous.
Nancy Holmes, The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems
Books by Cornelia Hoogland
Books by Ted Goodden