Monica Sjöö
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Monica Sjöö, (December 31, 1938 – 8 August 2005), was a Swedish painter and writer who was influential in the Goddess movement. She lived in Britain for the last decades of her life and died of cancer.
Monica Sjöö lost both of her sons in very traumatic ways. Her youngest son was killed in front of her by an oncoming car at age 15. Her eldest son died of cancer. Sjöö has had to work through pain and loneliness.
In pieces of her art she wished to "holistically express" her growing religious belief in the Great Mother as the cosmic spirit and generative force in the universe. This understanding is critical to comprehending her artwork. She claimed to enter a state of being or mind where knowledge was available from past, present, and future. These abstract beliefs were grounded with a firm foundation of action and activism. She was involved with the anarchist and anti-Vietnam War movements in Sweden in the 1960s and was active in the women's movement in Britain. Her political activism always grew out of her spiritual understandings of the earth as the living mother.
Sjöö's work and beliefs centred around her respect and care of the Goddess, or Mother Earth. The Goddess was "the beauty of the green earth, the life-giving waters, the consuming fires, the radiant moon, and the fiery sun". Sjöö's respect for nature and the environment was not just a belief but a spiritual truth. The Goddess/Earth was respected as the life giver. This respect was found not only in her art images, but in two texts which chronicle her journey through the written word.
The imagery Sjöö used in her paintings often make reference to birth, the female body, and nature. All of these images were central to her beliefs regarding her cosmic mother. She described herself as among the pioneers in this movement of reclaiming female divinity - along with many other writers, artists, poets, and thinkers.
Sjöö was an artist, a writer, one of the early, powerful visionaries of the Goddess movement. Her book, co-authored with Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, brought the hidden history of the Goddess back alive, and her paintings transformed ancient images and symbols into contemporary icons of female power.
[edit] Bibliography
- Sjöö, Monica; Barbara Mor (1991). The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 0-06-250791-5.
