Biography
Monica Sjöö – self-described ‘radical anarcho/eco-feminist and Goddess artist, writer and thinker involved in Earth spirituality’ – was born in Sweden in 1938, moved to the UK, lived in Bristol and died in 2005. Her life was touched with tragedy but her resilience was immense; her art was intertwined with activism, feminism and goddess worship – she didn’t believe in a spirituality that wasn’t political. (Annie Johnston, her daughter-in-law, remembers that if Sjöö came across patriarchal language while reading she would cross it out.)1 One of her best-known paintings, God Giving Birth (1968) – which depicts the Creator as a monumental full-frontal, naked Black woman graphically birthing her child – resulted in Sjöö being threatened with prosecution for obscenity and blasphemy and was removed from display three times: from Drury Lane in 1969, at the St Ives Arts Council festival in 1971 and Swiss Cottage Library in 1973. (It was eventually acquired by the Museum Anna Nordlander in Skelleftea, Sweden.)
In 2004, her health failing, Sjöö wrote a short autobiography. In it, she tells the harrowing tale of her childhood as the only daughter of two artists. She writes:
My parents painted side by side, lived in a tiny place in an attic where there were no cooking facilities, bath or hot water. I remember the smell of turps and paint but not of cooking. I suffered from a lack of vitamins but half rotting oranges stored in our backyard saved me from scurvy. My parents were totally unpractical and my father basically didn’t want me around.2
At the age of three, her mother moved with Sjöö to Stockholm where she tried, and failed, to support them with her art. Sjöö remembers how she painted trolls, ‘magical nature beings who are neither good nor bad and who could be as large as the mountains or as small as a pebble’. In 1949, her mother married an impoverished and paranoid Russian aristocrat; Monica was forced to sleep in the kitchen. She holidayed with her father, came across a book in his studio of William Blake and ‘was awestruck by its visionary qualities’. She visited exhibitions and was impressed by ‘Pre Aztec and massive Aztec sculptures, Catholic art and the vibrant revolutionary paintings by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and other artists’. She befriended young Marxists, who took her to films by Sergei Eisenstein; she left home at 16, ‘almost catatonic from depression and rejection’ and for the next few years worked as an artist’s model, hitch-hiked through Europe, married, travelled to England and gave birth to her first son, Sean. She suffered from post-natal depression and attempted to heal herself by drawing ‘visionary pastels while listening as in a trance to sacred Hebrew music’. Her second son, Toivo, was born at home in Bristol in 1961, an event, she wrote, that ‘changed my entire life and initiated me to the Great Mother’. She was inspired by a vision she had during Toivo’s birth, ‘of great radiant light alternating with deep luminous blackness. It was as if the Great Mother had shown Herself to me in Her pure cosmic energy form’.
Over the next four decades Sjöö travelled widely, made pilgrimages to sacred sites, frequently changed partners, had another child, studied history and concluded that ‘in Patriarchy men are sacred and women profane’. Self-taught, she worked as an assistant to the Swedish artist Siri Derkert and decided to dedicate her life ‘to creating paintings that speak of women’s lives, our history and sacredness’. In 1969, she co-founded Bristol Women’s Liberation; she protested US imperialism, the Vietnam war and the US missile base at Greenham Common; in the early 1970s, she became one of the founders of the Goddess movement. She was also a prolific writer, publishing (with Barbara Mor) The Great Cosmic Mother (1987) and individually, New Age Armageddon: Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future (1992) and Norse Goddess (1990). Throughout the 1990s, she was a regular contributor to From the Flames – a Journal of Politics and Spirit. She was also a co-founder of AMA MAWU named, in her words, because: ‘AMA means to breastfeed/mother/grandmother in different languages and MAWU is a great West-African Goddess’. The group organised moon rituals, actions against racism, the war against Iraq, GM foods and Globalisation. For much of her life, Sjöö struggled financially and she was devastated by the deaths of her 15-year-old son, Leify, in 1985, and her son Sean at 28 in 1987. In 1989, Sjöö painted My Sons in the Spiritworld because, she wrote: ‘I wanted them to be protected within the realm of Spiderwoman, who dwells in the centre’.3
In 2005 Monica Sjöö died of cancer; she was 66. In the main, her imagery is characterised by her visualisation of women as powerful and life-giving; as goddesses whose ancient wisdom can nourish contemporary life. When she made her pictures, she believed that ‘the spirits of the ancient sisterhood were communicating with her, from matriarchal cultures, which had been erased’.4 For all the darkness in her life, artmaking, for Sjöö was an act of joy and possibility; a means not only of expressing something about the present, but of communicating with the past and moving into a more positive future.
[1] Phone call between Jennifer Higgie and Monica Sjöö’s daughter-in-law, Annie Johnston, 21 April 2023
[2] Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotes from Monica Sjöö’s autobiography.
[3] Monica Sjöö, ‘My Sons in the Spirit World’, https://monicasjoo.co.uk/2014/…
[4] Phone call between Jennifer Higgie and Monica Sjöö’s daughter-in-law, Annie Johnston, 21 April 2023
Works
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After Oppression Revolution, 1968
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Back Street Abortion, 1968
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Past and Present, 1969
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Phallic Culture, 1970
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House-Wives, 1975
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Women’s Work and Crafts, 1975
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Women for Life on Earth, 1982
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Welsh Rocking Stone and Spiralling Spirit Woman, 1992
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St. Non’s Well, Holy Grail, 1996
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Paleolithic Mother of the Caves, 1997
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The Goddess and Green Man Tree of Life, 1997
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Maltese Goddess and the Hypogeum, 1998
Press
Exhibitions
Books
News

Monica Sjöö
in ‘Enchanted Alchemies: Magic Mysticism, and the Occult in Art’, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg Symposium
The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

Monica Sjöö
in ‘The Goddess, The Deity and the Cyborg’, The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge