Goddessing
Sylvie Roshier-JacobMonica Sjöö: The Great Cosmic Mother Reviewed
Modern Art Oxford
18th November 2023 – 25th February 2024
‘In the beginning… was a very female sea’, opens Monica Sjöö’s 1987 book The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. Amy Budd and Jo Widoff’s retrospective exhibition of Sjöö’s work takes the same name, with the intention to create a more complete picture of the life of this well-known but under-historicised artist. Displaying archival finds from across Sjöö’s career alongside her paintings, the exhibition strikingly brings the previously neglected history of Sjöö’s political life to the fore. It offers a Sjöö whose anarchism and ecofeminism are indissolubly interlaced and blisteringly conveyed. The exhibition is a ‘female sea’, luminous with the energy of a woman whose art form was her life itself, dedicated entirely to the ‘pure cosmic energy’ she saw embodied in the Great Mother: the divine maternal soul she could sense sustaining and running through the currents of all the natural and human world. Her lifelong dedication to the Neopagan religious ‘Goddess Movement’ is inseparable from her anarchic political beliefs: ‘No spirituality without politics’. Her political magazines and involvement in the 1982 ‘Embrace the Base’ action at Greenham Common (which saw more than 30,000 women join hands in peaceful protest around the chain-link fence surrounding a nuclear weapon site) are exhibited alongside her vivid, uncompromising paintings. For Sjöö, love of earth, love of humanity, and unifying spirituality cannot not be distinguished from her politics. Her activism is her art, her love.
Born in the north of Sweden in 1938, Sjöö lived most of her life in England and Wales. Her political and artistic life was amplified by her transcendental, cosmic experiences, which shaped her understanding of the ‘divine feminine’: Sjöö’s conception of the Great Mother takes on many different incarnations that loom, immense, from her paintings. Her version of beauty is ancestral, prehistoric, a contemporarily subversive femininity that rejects softness and submissiveness. In Aspects of the Great Mother (1971) statuesque female figures – archetypal symbols – are rendered eternal stone with her bold, thick brushstrokes. They peer down from the paintings with aloof, almond-shaped eyes and a stoic serenity: emanations of ancient pagan wisdoms, surging in the weird Edens of her ecofeminist landscapes.
Nothing Sjöö paints is passive. There is a directness in her early work that strikes bluntly in the exhibition’s first rooms. Sometimes, visual representation alone is not clear enough for Sjöö: she understands violence, she understands domination, and to speak against it, she knows she must speak. The total explicitness of the red text in God Giving Birth (1968), bloody against the black and white of the rest of the painting, drives home the clarity and undiluted significance of her message: she will not obfuscate her meaning. Her paintings are her manifesto. Sjöö wrote of her second experience of giving birth that ‘the enormous power of my woman’s body, both painful and cosmic…in my mind’s eye great luminous masses and blackness… radiant light coming and going.’ This glowing mass – for Sjöö, the Great Mother – is conceived of in the painting as a black woman giving divine birth to creation. The painter’s iconography was bald enough to come to the censorious attention of the ‘60s establishment; God Giving Birth almost landed Sjöö in court on account of its ‘obscenity and blasphemy’.
Sheela na Gig, Creation (1978) is placed in the middle of the first room, an ecstatically raw, psychedelic depiction of another divine creation. Menstrual blood streams from a gently opened vulva. Woman is Creator, she is ‘God Giving Birth’. Sjöö rejects patriarchal conceptions of female biology as abject, monstrous, or mundane, instead figuring a woman’s body as the sacred, divine source of all life. Sjöö offers an alternative creation story that liberates itself from the male-centric narratives and symbols of the Abrahamic religions (Eve, Woman, did not spring from Adam’s rib; she precedes and encompasses rib and Adam all). As you move through the room, Sjöö’s feminine theology establishes itself clearly in paintings like The Goddess at Avebury and Silbury (1978), which reconfigures Silbury Hill – a prehistoric artificial mound in Somerset – in symbols swept up from antiquity and the Bible. Snakes, swans, totemic figurines are seen emerging from a blood-red sea, atavistic iconographs washed up on the tides of her modern political paintings. This site, ‘the pregnant womb of Mother Earth,’ is where Sjöö first ‘met’ the Great Mother while on a mushroom trip.
Near the end of the exhibition, Rebirth from the Motherpot (1986), one of the very few paintings Sjöö made in the 1980s, strikes a uniquely autobiographical note. Emerging glowingly from a spreading lotus is a bubble delineating the face of a young boy, distinguished from the otherwise undifferentiated faces that dominate the paintings throughout the exhibition. The boy is Sjöö’s young son Leify, killed in a car crash in 1985; Sean, her other son, died of lymphoma two years later. The tragedies of Sjöö’s life in the eighties may account for her work’s apparent retreat from politics; these later paintings, lining the walls of the final room, seem to withdraw to the pagan spirit-gardens of her mind, with their bewildering teal spirals and white chalk horses. Yet in the room’s centre is a collection of her published magazines – Goddessing, Peace News and more. That Sjöö’s public-facing print materials appear in constellation with her more introspective and potentially autotelic work makes clear that her outward-looking spiritual-political activism never dwindled.
Sjöö’s binary, even essentialist, conceptions of gender and femininity feel outdated. However, it’s hard to ignore her cosmic ambitions and the uncompromising sincerity with which she dedicated herself to women’s liberation. Her emphasis on communality still feels radical: she aims to transcend her individuality, to express the wholeness she perceived in humanity, to rebel against the social and symbolic structures that alienate us. Sjöö proposes liberating alternatives: by interacting with the social and aesthetic world, we might disentangle the webs of patriarchal power and weave together new communities. The exhibition’s archival work situates her artistic energies within political history, illuminating how the greater stakes of her artwork proliferate outwards: art-making is protest. It proposes – or in Sjöö’s case, prophesies – a future in which change is possible. ‘Mater-Mother is alive and enspirited and there are no divisions (only “manmade” ones) between body and soul, matter and spirit. We must be graceful enough to return love and care to our Mother who gave us life,’ she writes in a posthumous collection of her neopagan pilgrimage texts, Spiral Journey (2018). Sjöö’s vision is one of unalloyed hope: harmony is where we began, and to harmony we can, and must, return.