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Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother at Modern Art Oxford
Spirituality, ecofeminism, and beyond; we dive into the art of Swedish artist Monica Sjöö
December 20, 2023
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
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Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
.jpg)
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
.jpg)
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
.jpg)
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
.jpg)
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
Police twice removed the painting ‘God Giving Birth’ from public display in the 1970s; from a small town hall in St Ives, and Swiss Cottage Library, in northwest London. Its maker, the Swedish-British artist Monica Sjöö, was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy and obscenity, for her spiritual depiction of a Universal Mother. ‘God Giving Birth’ became so controversial – and mythologised – that even Maggie Parks, Sjöö’s ‘lifelong friend and co-conspirator’ had only ever seen it in poster form, prior to its hanging at Modern Art Oxford (MAO).
Elevated in its display on the walls of this exhibition, it is both a symbol of the miracle of childbirth, the status of ‘mad women with delusions of being the Mothers of God’, and deeply rooted in the artist’s difficult experiences of motherhood. It only exposes how conservative Britain remained during the ‘swinging sixties’, reflecting the attitudes of those in positions of relative privilege, and other women. (‘She was pissed at Barbara Hepworth for not backing her,’ Parks adds, in reference to the work’s first removal.)
After this experience, Sjöö had the work guarded for fear of its destruction, and eschewed an emerging career as an individually exhibiting artist, for group exhibitions with other women. Indeed, save for two connected and mobile exhibitions in 2022, at Beaconsfield and Feminist Library in south London – Sjöö has had few solo exhibitions at all.
The presentation of The Great Cosmic Mother at MAO punctuates its tour of Sweden, from the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to its second site, in Malmö. Co-curated by Jo Widoff in Sweden and Amy Budd in Oxford – with contributions from fellow cosmic thinkers as Amy Tobin – the content has changed little in its travel. (The Swedish iterations feature some sculptures of working men’s boots, atypical in representations of the artist’s practice, which usually focus on her paintings on textiles.) The context, though, of their display differs dramatically.
Outside of Sweden, Sjöö is often strictly categorised as an ecofeminist. But in her early works, we trace how her politics was ‘incubated’ in her early twenties in Stockholm. Long before she moved to Bristol in the UK, which became a base for the rest of her life, she was interested in international affairs, an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War protests back in Sweden.
Indeed, her politics was wholly intersectional, even multidirectional, producing works which are grounded in contemporary economic and material conditions, but also don’t shy from advancing towards the spiritual, or returning to history. ‘Women are the real left,’ reads one painting; ‘Tremble, Tremble, the witches are returning - not to be burned but to be paid,’ another. They’re also artefacts of her political engagement; the aspect of Emma Goldman, an early 20th century anarcho-feminist imprisoned for circulating education about birth control, crops up repeatedly.
The curation speaks of her ‘agitprop approach’ of combining slogans and images, but it is one that also practically challenged the hierarchy of artistic forms. Throughout, we see how Sjöö was not precious about any media, transforming many of her paintings into posters to be carried out on political protests. Many are here reproduced, in MAO’s typical archive-and-slides space.
The journey is both chronological and thematic. The first room is arresting, stained blood red with Sjöö’s early works, a thrilling visual contrast with the building’s white brick walls. Violent, screaming aspects sit comfortably alongside lesser-known works of folded paper and collage, the layers of her practice made literal.
Archival interventions do not overwhelm us with information; on the contrary, they’re more often testaments to how fun, and silly, the artist was too. Such plurality is often deprived of women, but the exhibition shows Sjöö as both goddess and a flesh and bones person; as Parks suggests, ‘someone who also loved a cup of tea and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies’.
A Kodak Carousel s-AV 2050 projector reels out found footage and photographs on the walls. We meet Sjöö along the walk to RAF Greenham Common in 1981, traversing Salisbury Plain via Stonehenge. It was an act as much about the process, of women together reclaiming the landscape and environment, as its conclusion. ‘We are women, we are strong’ echoes in the space, the sisters’ chanting to the tune of Frère Jacques, clutching placards peppered with the slogans of the CND.
Sjöö certainly saw nuclear war as symptomatic of a patriarchal world order, pointing to rockets and missiles as figurations of a fragile, ‘phallic culture’. Her posters also provide alternative perspectives on the now-mythologised event and location. (See, for example, Radical Landscapes, and RE/SISTERS, two exhibitions currently on view in London.) Her maps suggest that each entrance to Greenham had a different energy; her emphasis is heavy on the Spiritual Gate. This interest in entry points and movement permeates her later paintings, where we find cavernous ‘tomb womb’ spaces.
Her wider practice also encourages us to look elsewhere, beyond England. ‘Mother Earth in Pain’ (1996) was painted, in part, in response to an oil spill in Pembrokeshire, whilst other works reference similar environmental disasters on the Welsh littoral. In the exhibition, there are works on the protests in Newbury where women would sit in trees, highlighting her belief in human/nature as never separate, but intimately entwined.
For the artist, demonstrations served as a form of community-building and connection, one that continued in her practice. Sjöö’s spirituality sent her on pilgrimages, and visits to sacred sites. After journeys to Malta and Crete, an abundance of sphinxes and cows crop up in her works, more figurative representations of her long interest in the ‘lunar thinking’ of ancient matriarchal cultures. But it was one without nostalgia or longing for the past, and rather a search for another kind of solidarity – a communal ‘grieving at our loss of woman cultures’, which also served as a means of coping with the premature deaths of her two sons.
Art clearly served as a means for understanding the present; ’Ishtar-Inanna: Queen of Heaven and the Underworld’ (1991), painted in response to the Iran-Iraq War, is one of many that combines historic and contemporary motifs, this highlighting continuities over time. More subtle are her many references to ‘African’ masks, often appropriated in Western European art, but here evidence of her complex, committed engagement with the problematic practices of her period, particularly in the New Age movement. Indeed, her paintings of political activists and women of colour are void of performativity, sharing the same devotional, honorific status as her spiritual bodies.
Sjöö’s practice was as anthropological as artistic; beyond Goldman, she references Marija Gimbutas, another banned academic. In the final room dedicated to her later practice, we see how she refused institutions altogether – seeing the art world and market as patriarchal – and exhibiting instead at spiritual and goddess festivals, and in radical bookshops.
There are glimpses of her sprawling lectures (still available online) and most of her writings in journals like Heresies and Pagans Against Nukes (P.A.N.), now collected in the text Spiral Journey. In them, she interspersed her own work with her contemporaries and the canonised. We might observe an overlap with the likes of Claudette Johnson who undertook a similar practice, though in a conscious effort to place herself within the art historical canon. And Sjöö joins the likes Johnson and Marlene Smith at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt!, curator Linsey Young’s bid to restage and recreate works of historic import.
Though united in their historic marginalisation, it is vital to differentiate their intentions and outcomes. By the time of Johnson’s infamous talk at the First National Black Art Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, Sjöö had long turned away from the mainstream feminist art exhibitions in which she participated in the 1970s. She was actively rejecting the institution as a model; many others were reacting to their exclusion from them.
Nor has her practice ever risked falling into posthumous obscurity. ‘She wasn’t overlooked,’ clarifies Annie Johnston, the artist’s ‘daughter-in-love’ and now keeper of the estate, ‘but rather well-known and respected amongst the communities she circulated.’ In the interim, her works have long been circulated amongst Sweden’s feminist artists, movements separate from, though simultaneous to, those in the UK. (Even in Scandinavia, stereotyped for its particular, more liberal, approaches nudity and women’s bodies, her works have previously been labelled ‘pornographic’.) For Johnston, the lack of institutional recognition - for which she didn’t care – came from her in-between status, as ‘not quite Swedish and not quite British’.
The Great Cosmic Mother highlights how prolific she was, producing enough work for the 40 exhibitions of her lifetime, and to ensure a continued presence in online/archives. Indeed, the estate has taken careful decisions, leaning away from her biography and into the books she wrote, borrowing the title of one for this own exhibition (The one caveat being their certain claim that ‘she would be proud’ of seeing her works exhibited alone, or loaned to large institutions.) It is evident that she perceived her own work as important from a young age, in the way she signed her name in big, scrawling letters on the back, visible on the display on Stockholm, where the works were hung aerial in the space for to see all.
We can indulge in the small handwritings of her diaries, records, and letters that she sent, a form of self-archiving. Whilst she donated and sold many works during her lifetime, she documented them all by address, no doubt evidence of the organisation and activism leaking into her transdisciplinary practice.
‘West Kennet Long Barrow’ (1989) is one of those works that won’t travel with The Great Cosmic Mother. On loan from Glastonbury Goddess Temple, it is an active tool of devotion; the curators are deftly aware that it is removed from its context – and purpose – in this conventional museum display.
The estate have 70% of her known works, but more are still being tracked down. Some can be found in Cambridge, curated in conversation with another celestial body of works at Murray Edwards College. Johnston is tight-lipped about the location of the archive. It’s probably at the end of one of Sjöö’s vaginal-esque canals.
But rather than house them in Hilma af Klint-like temple –or forget them in archives– perhaps these temporary, satellite exhibitions are actually closer to the artist’s vision for her practice – one that moves, and moves people, into further research.
The Great Cosmic Mother seems only the beginning. As with MAO’s groundbreaking Ruth Asawa exhibition in 2022, which transformed the artist’s estate into a full-time job for the next generation, there’s so much to learn about and from Sjöö. Did she connect with her near-contemporary Scandinavian artist Ovartaci, over their common tree-formed people? Or Georgina Smith, the Scottish artist imprisoned for her anti-nuclear activism, who still opts for display in public libraries?
The artist’s works goes deeper than surface level progressive politics of our contemporary moment, the mythologisation of ‘proto-intersectional’ movements of the 1970s and 1980s too. Sjöö challenges the strict categorisation of how both a woman and a feminist artist of the period might practice; whether in her big, rather than small and intimate, paintings, or in her combination of both hope and critical pessimism.
Johnston, and Widoff and Budd, are clearly conscious of how the artist’s presence lingers over the exhibition. Their critical engagement – and how young people relate to Sjöö’s practice - matters. In Sweden, the exhibition leant into the country’s strong, contemporary young ecofeminist movement; no doubt, Greta Thunberg lingered over the line ‘Sibyl looks into the future and finds it wanting’.
Fresh eyes will find so much more in Sjöö’s bottomless works, but what is haunting is how much has stayed the same. Of all the works on display, MAO’s Young Curators were all drawn to the early works from the 1970s, their responses included in the curation by captions. Fresh relevance has been layered atop works like ‘Back Street Abortion - Women Seeking Freedom from Oppression’ (1968) in light of the recent decision overruling Roe v. Wade, a law passed just five years after it was painted by the artist. Fifty years later, we still live in a world where ‘Medicine is Controlled by Men’.
Indeed, there’s an irony in that the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition, one of the first opportunities for her works to be safely exhibited, comes at a time when young women are as conscious of safety in numbers as ever before.
And so always welcome is the news of representation, and forthcoming solo exhibition, at Alison Jacques in London in 2024; likewise, Sjöö’s inclusion in the aforementioned shows. But we mustn’t let these dynamic works remain static, in the capital or a single collection (In Jacques’ case, a conversation with Nicola L. on women’s bodies, might be interesting.)
Monica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother is on view at Modern Art Oxford (MAO) until 25 February 2024, then Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden until 1 September 2024.
