The art, life and thought of Monica Sjöö

What does it mean to revisit feminist artists in a new context now? Katy Deepwell discusses this in view of Monica Sjöö's retrospective at Beaconsfield Ltd last fall. With Moderna Museet currently exhibiting Sjöö's works, Paletten publishes the english version of Deepwells text online, first published in Paletten #330: 2022.

What investments are we making when we revise an artist’s reputation by reintroducing their work to new audiences: are the options only scalp-hunting (introducing new figures) or canon-making (consecration in a canon), as Maria Lind suggests? Monica Sjöö’s (1938-2005) exhibition of 50+ paintings at Beaconsfield Ltd, London (11 June – 10 September 2022), shown for the first time together after her death from the artist’s estate, offers an opportunity for reflection and reassessment of this artist.

While feminist art history often produces narratives where recovery of individual women artist’s reputations or ideas from women’s histories and perspectives are major themes, its re-evaluations are always linked to distinct contemporary concerns in the politics of feminism.

The programming around the exhibition (generated by Minna Haukka, Naomi Siderfin and David Crawforth for Beaconsfield) links this exhibition of one of the early pioneers in 1970s feminist art in both Sweden and the UK and a creator of many alternative imaginaries about Womanpower to the explosion of interest today in witches, goddesses and magic evident in social media and eco-feminist, LGTBQI and anti-racist versions of intersectional feminisms.

Celebrating Goddesses and neo-Pagan rituals became practices in Sjöö’s later life, connecting her with Starhawk and Zuzanna Budapest in California and the Oregon community around WomanSpirit journal (1974-1984) as well as the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury (registered as a place of worship in 2003).

Sjöö’s view of the Cosmos linked to Mother Earth is rooted in her research into ancient matriarchal and matri-focal cultures that existed before patriarchy. Her feminist approach to Paganism developed through many years of study of pagan religions and visits to Celtic and neolithic sites.

Given many feminists’ rejection of goddess imagery as essentialist, it is necessary to consider more carefully how the personal became political in Sjöö’s life and what were the politics of her artwork and writing, especially given the wave of interest in her concerns amongst young women today. What remains distinctive and appealing to a younger generation of feminists about Monica’s vision is how her feminist scholarship and belief system combined a critique of patriarchy, racism and Marxism with peace activism, eco-feminism and bi-sexuality in her life.

I never met Monica Sjöö as our paths did not cross during the 1980s or 1990s, even though I recently discovered we were both at a protest of 30,000 women called ‘Embrace the Base’ at Greenham Common in 1982. I have become acquainted with her through her writing, paintings and prints and so can only discuss her views of the world by grasping at what she left behind. When I found her and Anne Berg’s ‘Arts manifesto’ (1971) as a pamphlet in the British Library in 2011, I immediately took the opportunity to republish it in n.paradoxa and later in a book with other feminist art manifestos.

I’m interested in how she developed her approach to painting which linked her art and politics, a radical activism to complex use of imagery in these paintings, as she later used her own works in posters on rallies as symbols for alternative ways of thinking.

Of course, I am interested in genealogies among women artists and how feminism features in their life and work. Sjöö made a major contribution to many feminist initiatives in the early Women’s Liberation Movement in both the UK and Sweden. I’m also interested in the vision of a left-wing feminist imaginary that she invested in and sought to produce, particularly evident in the period 1965-1975, and her attitudes to Marxism/ anarchism/ syndicalism/ pacificism which she then pursued in a lifetime of activism in anti-war protests at Greenham Common, in ‘Pagans against Nukes’, as well as for women’s sexual liberation. Her writing is very important in communicating this consistent and developing vision of the world. I offer a reading of some writings by her in what follows.

Sjöö, the painter

Sjöö explored painting as a post-medium condition, literally as a system of signs displayed across many canvases that were always presented together. At Beaconsfield this “effect” of reading across her paintings shared display strategies used in her earlier exhibitions, creating effectively large-scale murals by hanging many of her paintings together.

As a painter working with symbols and signs, Sjöö’s work does require attention to the ‘indexical effect’, as suggested by Isabelle Graw, but I am arguing it is necessary to think beyond the ‘quasi presence’ of the author in their painting or about painting as more than just a ‘highly personalized semiotic activity’.

Sjöö, the author/artist, cannot be seen in the painting (a modernist approach to subjective readings of author) but her presence as author can only be found in a wider exploration of the context, arguments and politics to which she aligned her own thought.

As early as 1964, as Sjöö writes in her online autobiography, her ambition was to develop a ‘woman-centred painting which was also figurative’. Her work is a complex renegotiation of other identifiable realist, expressionist and symbolist strategies in figuration, comparable with her peers in Sweden and UK and utilising collage, appropriation, layering, repetition and juxtaposition of imagery. This approach is anti-modernist rather than pre-modern.

First, it is necessary to compare her different reputation in two countries: Sweden, where she was born (1938) but left at age 17, returning only to live for short periods (1958-1959, 1965-1967) and exhibit, with that of the UK where she mainly lived and worked after 1957. From 1967, she lived in St Ives, then Bristol, then Wales, and then moved back to Bristol. In the UK, during her lifetime, neither the Tate nor the Arts Council acquired any works by Monica Sjöö, even though she exhibited widely at many UK venues. Most of the spaces where she exhibited were alternative/artist-run spaces, town halls and libraries and many of the exhibitions were self-organised, often with other artists. She had no commercial dealer and did not live in London but this only partly accounts for why her work was not acquired during her lifetime. Her work is currently in only one national public art collection, New Hall’s art collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, a collection formed in the 1990s to represent women’s art in the UK and created largely through donations from the artists themselves.

The two works are of ancient sites and goddesses: Dancing Women (1993) and Earth is our Mother (1984). The majority of her large archive of papers and her paintings remain in her family’s estate in the UK. Outside her own estate, the other place that has several of her works is The Goddess Temple in Glastonbury. Sjöö, and her son, Toivo, donated a collection of her writings to the Feminist Archive South in Bristol in the 2000s before her death. Rupert White estimated around ¼ of her archive is in Swedish and very little was translated to English in his book of her life and letters.

By contrast, her work in Sweden at the major national collection, Moderna Museet, is of 6 works from 1965-1973 (all acquired after her death) and these works are explicitly political in subject matter: about women’s oppression, childbirth (linking first world and third world images of mothers), a portrait of Janis Joplin and Angela Davis, and one of her many activist posters. The one painting which isn’t like this, a near abstract work, Cosmos within her womb (1971, but acquired in 2007), was included in Moderna Museet’s Second Museum of our Wishes project in 2010-2011, designed to promote works by women in their collection. Many more of her paintings are in the Anna Nordlander Museum, Skelleftea, including the iconic God Giving Birth (1968).

As a result of this distribution of her work, her current reputation differs in the UK and Sweden. In the UK, there is a tendency to concentrate on her approach to ancient religions, goddess worship and neo-paganism in her art and through her writings. In Sweden, her reputation as a painter of political subjects and early feminist imagery is stronger as it is clearly linked to radical tendencies in Swedish art of the late 1960s to mid-1970s. Moderna Museet’s website, for example, describes her as ‘an intellectual observer and theorist rather than religious, even if her belief in the goddess was deeply personal’. Another register of these differences is that while Moderna Museet is planning a major retrospective on Sjöö in 2023, just one painting and perhaps a print may be included in a future exhibition in 2023/2024 at Tate Britain on ‘British Feminist Art, 1970-1990’. As her 1971 manifesto concludes and this was used in the title of the Beaconsfield exhibition: ‘Monica Sjöö The time is NOW and it is overdue!’. More mainstream acceptance of her contribution was already long overdue during the 1970s and her work has only occasionally been shown in the global expansion of women artists’ retrospectives in the period, 1995-2015 (e.g. Konstfeminism, 2005 and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 2007).

In Sweden, Monica’s first solo show was in 1967 (Karlsson Gallery, Stockholm) and this gained her a reputation as an artist exploring sexuality and female liberation, combined with a strong critique of patriarchy. She co-organised and took part in three of the earliest feminist exhibitions in the UK: TheFirst Feminists Art Show (Woodstock Gallery, London, 1971); Images of Womanpower (Swiss Cottage Library, London, 1973) and Woman Power with Beverly Skinner (Bristol Art College, 1975). Later, she took part in two landmark feminist exhibitions in Sweden: Kvinnoliv/Women’s Life (Konsthall, Lund, 1974 and touring) and Kvinnfolk/Women Folk (Malmo Konsthall, 1975). Six painters from the last show were then included in an expanded show of 31 artists and 199 works and exhibited as Kvinnor av Kvinnor om Kvinnor/Art by women about women (Kulturhuset, Stockholm, 1975), and this became a book: AnneLindberg and Barbro WerkmasterKvinnor som Konstnarer (Stockholm, 1975). Her major show, Woman Magic, which opened in Copenhagen in 1982, toured for several years, ending in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Sjöö proposed many exhibitions of women’s art and this struggle to get her work exhibited with and alongside other feminist artists is also discussed in her writings. Kvinnoliv was initially proposed as an idea by her and artist Anna Sjodahl to Gosta Lilja, Director of Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, who turned them down. It was realised in Lund by art historians, Barbro Werkmeister and Anna Lena Lindberg – and Barbro Werkmeister was much later also instrumental in the Swedish feminist retrospective, Konstfeminism. In 1970, Sjöö had also proposed with Anne Berg a feminist and figurative exhibition to the Serpentine Gallery and its rejection is noted in the 1971 Arts Manifesto and in the pamphlet: Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art (1971) where the letters are published. What was proposed was too different from the early 1970s programme of the Serpentine which was dominated by abstract work and male painters: which is partly why 1960s abstraction is heavily criticised in the Manifesto as ‘playful gimmicks characteristic of contented and successful solo artists’ alongside the author’s futurist-style declaration of ‘DEATH TO THE PLASTIC CULTURE’ of commercialism and the commercial art world.

Sjöö, the person

In her writings, Sjöö talks many times about poverty, and her own struggle to raise funds, not only to make work, but also to get the work into exhibitions and to travel to these shows. She also spoke about watching the struggles of her own mother, living in isolation as a single mother with a physical disability and as an artist in Sweden, after being divorced from a more successful male artist. In 1977 in the feminist art publication, MaMA! (UK), she writes about the struggle to raise funds to return to Sweden to take part in Kvinnoliv with Anna Sjödahl (and Benedicte Bergmann) and its importance to her. As a Swedish person in the UK, she was not eligible for grants in Sweden, while living abroad, and she was also regarded as ‘self-taught’ because she did not attend art schools in Sweden. In the end, she was able to borrow money from Group 8, part of the Swedish Women’s Movement in Stockholm to get there. She was exhibiting 5 years of work, and she travelled with her four-year-old son, Leif, for 2 months to take part in the exhibition, its tour and other related events. She notes the ‘faint disapproval’ of her childcare plans but sets this against the importance for her as an artist of having her first major show in 7 years in Sweden. ‘I am saying that no man would ever have to do his work under similar conditions and that nothing in our society is arranged in such a way as to take into account that children actually exist’. Poverty, not ambition or childcare, is the major problem she identifies for women in taking their art to a public, but this is not a complaint about ‘precarious labour’ or the general uncertainty about living from work as an artist nor a reinforcement of romantic ideas of the artist starving in the garret waiting to be discovered. Poverty is repeatedly discussed as a social condition linked to other oppressions of race and class, and Sjöö was critical of bourgeois norms and values, not just in the art world but also in alternative religions and lifestyles.

When Sjöö moved back permanently to the UK in 1967, she continued to paint and write, but she had to look after her children (Sean b. 1959, Toivo, b.1961, Leif b. 1970), do the housework and the shopping and earn a living. There is nothing unusual about this situation, familiar to millions of women worldwide as ‘a juggling act’ or ‘the double burden’, because they put their children first even as they pursue their own working lives. Her argument that women are the ‘real left’ because they know it is not possible through willpower or self-determination to ‘transcend inequalities’ provides another clue to a more realistic picture of her left-wing beliefs. The phrase, ‘Women are the Real Left’, is drawn from a text by Robin Morgan which Sjöö also used in a poster. In her writing, like the 1971 manifesto, however, it is the attitudes of men as gatekeepers of an oppressive culture that reinforces systemic sexism that she attacks, and again women’s oppression is never seen ‘in isolation from oppressive realities’ of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. Like other feminists, she includes the many institutionalised and male-dominated religions in the world, not just Christianity, in this critique.

Vague suggestions that she was a ‘new Age’ artist because she often wrote of being a medium through which the Great Mother spoke, ignore her own critique of New Age cults. She regarded these cults as damaging and patriarchal in their ideas of spiritual transcendence and was critical of their recreation of ancient rituals in her 1990s book, New Age and Armageddon. This was also a deeply felt reaction to their idea that a healing mindset is enough, because of the negative role this played in her own son’s death from cancer. Pre-emptive views of her neo-paganism require revision by attention to other politics and motivations in her life and work as they evolved, including living alternative and lesbian lifestyles.

In 1971, Sjöö wrote that the Goddess is the ‘projection of a community who were NOT sexually repressed and economically dominated’…’a type of woman that is banished with the destruction of matriarchal civilisation’. Sjöö clearly acknowledges the role of the Goddess as a visual resource, a fantasy, on which to project alternative realities and rethink myths for a feminist future. In 1977, she described how her interest in ‘the Cosmic Mother of All’ is not ‘some form of escape from having to face up to the very real and acute economic and sexual oppression of women in present capitalist societies…[it] gave me strength and hope to struggle in the long years before the rebirth of the Women’s Movement’. Sjöö joined and took part in many anarchist and alternative Socialist movements protests, especially those which sought broader coalitions, redefining the idea that the only site of struggle was at the factory gate or in solidarity with a male-dominated group of workers as the proletariat. In her book, The Great Cosmic Mother, co-written with Barbara Mor, the critique of Marxism is explicit: ‘My political activism always grew out of my spiritual understandings of the earth as the living Mother because the Goddess is injured wherever there is injustice, wanton cruelty, poverty, and pollution’ (p.xix). The focus only on a Marxist economics and a Unionised image of the proletariat is considered too limiting. The alliance politics of active coalitions across political divides for change is advocated as an alternative and it is this that links her most clearly with today’s feminist coalition-building left politics as well as images of empowerment: highlighting women’s strengths as mothers and as active political beings.

Sjöö, the image-maker

In the 1980s in the UK, she was not alone in expressing feminist interest in figurative painting and image-making to rethink negative mythologies about women from feminist perspectives. Many other women were doing this: Paula Rego, Alexis Hunter, Jacqueline Morreau or, her friend, Beverley Skinner. A belief in a ‘transvaluation of values’ underpins why many women artists turned to transforming myths in figurative imagery: focusing on female characters, role reversals or a feminist retelling of myths and fairytales since the 1960s in both art and fiction (see, for example, Marina Warner’s writing on this subject). The visible alternative Marxist/Socialist view was a concentration on realist imagery of everyday life and making representations of and about social and political issues. Sjöö’s experimentation with realism initially, can be seen in many of her early works, like Back Street Abortion – Women seeking Freedom from Oppression (1968) (Moderna Museet) or After Oppression Revolution, 1968. She then developed an interest in poster production for the women’s movement during the 1970s, but soon switched her graphic images in these away from realism towards re-using her paintings as symbols for a different sensibility and politics. In respect of her approach to realism/figuration from a woman’s perspective, her work aligns with Anna Sjodhal, Marie-Louise Ekman and Lena Cronqvist in the 1960s in Sweden with whom she exhibited in the 1970s as well as colleagues/friends like African American Black Power artist Cliff Jackson and the Norwegian gay artist Kjartan Slettemark. The titles of her works of the late 1960s-early 1970s feature: Oppression, Liberation, Revolution, Freedom, Housewives, Women’s Work and the famous saying ‘Women have only their Chains to Lose’, in multi-cultural representations of women from different continents, particularly images of mothers. In these works, she linked first world and third world women through shared experiences of motherhood, of birth, of oppression; a strong feature of early Women’s Liberation magazines and left political thought, but something rarely found in art (see for example, Adrian Piper’s Pretend #2 (1990)). Sjöö later started to combine these images with symbolic imagery of religious figures, particularly women: Celtic fertility symbols (Sheela-na-gig), Paleolithic sculptures of pregnant women; African sculptures and carved Norse goddesses.

One feature that becomes clearer through seeing her work in person, rather than through reproduction, is her use of colour. While the early works are often made with a restricted palette, as if referencing their origins in newsreel or newspaper photography, using brown/red/ochre/yellow, her later works are bolder and brighter with colours distilled from the landscapes she painted and luminous greens, yellows and blues. Her leftist approach to transforming the symbolic register and visual imagination about the world can be seen in how she chose to hang her works. The effectiveness of the large scale of her works from the 1970s on identical size canvases – displayed floor to ceiling in small rooms, and often hung together in lines, like Woman Magic (Copenhagen, 1982) or as mural sequences across the wall forming total installations, rather than as distinct works was an important dimension to the Beaconsfield exhibition.

The concentration on her investigations of ancient matriarchal and pagan religions and her interest in female goddesses in the 1980s and 1990s might place her too quickly as representative of a globalising and universal sisterhood endemic to white radical and anarchist feminism in the 1970s, tendencies in the woman’s movement heavily criticised by both black and lesbian feminists in many national and international gatherings. A negative assessment of her as a hippy who took magic mushrooms and had revelatory experiences at Silbury based on her own description of these experiences might however reinforce this cultist view of her. Contrast this perhaps with the reverence paid to the impact that mystical experiences attributed to men’s experimental use of drugs in the 1970s, particularly LSD, had on their art. However, Sjöö never made any claims to universal truths in the myths she explored or images she painted of particular sacred sites and dreams. The references to sites in her works are landscape-specific and often time-bound and/or localised to places she visited in Europe. It is this attention to place that has led to her reputation as an eco-feminist, but her reverence is reserved for painting sacred sites and symbols. While the striking painting Mother Earth in Pain, Her Trees Cut Down, Her Seas Polluted (1996) points to the generic problem behind man’s pollution and destruction of the landscape, it was painted after a walk in ancient woodlands in Newbury with the Bristol Ama Mawu group. Sjöö names particular places in her titles of the 1980s and 1990s, especially St Non’s Well, Avebury, Glastonbury and Pentre Ifan: where ancient sites are juxtaposed with sculptural forms from particular eras or continents, Nordic, African, and Indian images of ancient, neolithic and bronze-age female deities sit alongside Celtic/Cornish/Welsh or Maltese/Ibizian sites. Her work floats these different realities together: landscapes become surreal tableau, repeated or mirrored figures drawn from ancient artefacts disappear into or float above their relation to the earth: linking background and foreground in strange juxtapositions, tropes not uncommon in postmodern painting of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, she concentrates on Amazon Warriors with a triptych from 2000 unusually linking 3 figures of pagan religion, the Lunar Queen, the Solar Goddess of Africa and an Underworld Goddess. The imagery she uses is absolutely distinct from the many populist, kitsch and graphic art depictions of goddesses and sci-fi fantasy circulating online and in shops selling occult objects or promoting Wicca. In 2000, Sjöö published a book on The Norse Goddess and a second on African Origins was planned but never published.

Given her lifetime of activism on many issues and her critiques of New Age cults, these stereotypes around her work as simple images of goddess culture need to be rethought. Sjöö pursued an anti-racist strategy in her work and refused to link ‘the light’ of revelation with any conception of whiteness, something she was critical of in Goddess worship in the USA and UK, and her fascination with the singular idea of a ‘Great Cosmic Mother’ who has African roots, drew her the support and friendship of the author, Alice Walker. Kavita Maya, in an online discussion organised by the Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective, makes the important point about how Monica’s imagery often contrasts a dark and a light mother, referring back to MAWU, as an African ancestral mother, a Black Isis or a Black Madonna and rejects any racialised cult of a ‘white’ goddess alone as an object for worship or fantasy. This imagery appears in God Giving Birth (1968), where the mother has a face divided into black and white, a mask, and Sjöö herself names the mother as ‘black’ in several interviews. Too often, this work is ‘explained’ only by reference to Monica Sjöö’s personal experience, because she has described her own sense of her physical power in giving birth at home to her son, Toivo in 1961, as a rationale that underpins this vision of woman power in the universe. However, the scandal generated by the gender reversal in this painting where God is even portrayed as female should also be reconsidered. Sjöö deliberately reconfigures God into a black/white pregnant goddess/woman giving birth to the world by linking this act to pagan and indigenous views of the cosmos and planetary origin stories, including images of the planets as well as the earth. The scandal of this painting being removed from several exhibitions in the UK and the censorship of a contemporary artist’s work generated more interest for a long time in the artist rather than in its message. Her own response regarding the subject matter of her works was to argue: ‘I am persecuted as a woman and as an artist who refuses to portray women as sexual victims but perceives of us as creators, as doers, as people of strength, my vision is of the women of the matriarchal past and future.’

In 1967, female liberation was also sexual liberation, but Sjöö’s celebration of female sexuality is also specific to freedom and sexual pleasure pursued without shame, guilt or coercion, where sensuality is reciprocal for both partners, and where sex creates a positive connection between people that can be openly spoken about. This is love as a positive force in the world: a force echoed and reiterated in much of the LGBTQI community globally and in calls for global coalitions on many social issues today. In 1962, in her notebooks, she wrote about how her early family life and the breakup of her parents negatively impacted on her view of sex: ‘All this turned my feelings into self-destruction, and to turning wonderful love into continued thought in the forms of ugliest pornography. Never being able to think of sexual love as anything other than sadistic violence and nasty’.

In the late 1960s in Sweden, her view of sexual liberation in her work explicitly combined an interest in pornographic images for women and graphic depictions of male penises as symbols of phallic power. Her early combine painting Patriarchal Male (1967) substitutes a cannon for a penis and has real boots for the man’s feet. In the background, there is a scraffiti-like spread of different images of men. In the Swedish journal Ord&Bild where Sjöö’s sculpture Patriarchal Male is reproduced, she is described as ‘Provie and gender-role fighter’ (April 1967). Her early explicit imagery of erect penises was airbrushed out of photos published in SE, in Sweden in 1966 and she had been keen to distribute Expedition 66, the first porn magazine for women. One of the responses to her 1967 show was to call her ‘Sweden’s first pornography painter’, but this relationship with pornographic imagery was ‘brief’. Her argument at the time was: ‘I want to take a look at old taboos…It is absolutely absurd that women in today’s society are still sex and sexual objects for sex-hungry men. All advertisements are aimed at men. Because I am female and, in addition, artist, I think it's illogical and feel it my duty to protest against this’.

She later wrote about how sexual pleasure, pursued in face-to-face encounters between partners separated human beings from animals’ rear entry and divorced sex from either simple biological reproduction or mating dependent on being ‘in season’. This view of sexual freedom as a cultural consensual and pleasurable experience without shame underpins her view of women’s sexual liberation, including both hetero- and homosexual experiences. She described herself as bisexual and although married 3 times and had 3 children, she had relationships with both men and women. In line with most feminists globally, she advocated that motherhood was to be a woman’s choice. Control and policing of women’s sexuality, including reproduction rights, by men was how patriarchy operated, as identified by her depictions of women from across the globe. One of her paintings refers to the book, Our Bodies Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1970), for many Western women, a guide to a feminist control and knowledge of their own bodies, acknowledging their pluri-sexuality, and overcoming generations of shame in ‘not speaking’ about women’s sex organs or acknowledging women’s different life cycles, physical forms and experiences.

Sjöö and Siri Derkert

While Sjöö lived in Sweden from 1965-1967, following her mother’s death, she attended a lecture by Siri Derkert, one of Sweden’s foremost woman artists and a lifetime Socialist feminist and peace campaigner. In 1960, Derkert had a retrospective at Moderna Museet and in 1962 represented Sweden in Venice, both exceptional achievements amongst women artists, at the time. Monica worked with her as an assistant several times in this period and on her major commission Sverigeväggen [Sweden Wall], 1967-1969, Kunsträdgården, Stockholm. This wall contains a neolithic pregnant woman modelled in bronze, as well as portraits of literary figures, and an extract of music. Barbro Werkmäster, who worked with Sjöö on Kvinnoliv, comments in Konstfeminism (2005) that ‘it is a dizzying feeling to think that this overlapping of the feminist consciousness of two generations took place on a personal level in collaborating on an original work of art’. The elements of their exchanges and collaboration are far-reaching and reciprocal but they also indicate how Derkert offered a role model for a different kind of art practice and public life. Sjöö herself acknowledges the importance of their meeting. Derkert had just completed her commission for the decoration of Östermalmstorg Station (1965) on Stockholm’s underground. Here, Derkert produced drawings in concrete of famous women in literature, linked to notes of the Marseillaise, and a female chora. Sjöö wrote an article about the ‘tunnel art’ for the Syndicalist Bulletin, in 1966. Derkert had lived in Paris in 1913, producing Cubist works and collages at the time of Picasso’s and Gris’ development of cubism and cubism is praised in Sjöö’s 1971 manifesto for its ability to break illusionist views of reality and romanticism. Sjöö uses juxtaposition of images in her work rather than just collage, but collage is a key trope in Derkert’s work. In 1949, the year Simone de Beauvoir released The Second Sex, Derkert published a major article ‘Woman – means or goal’ in Ny Dag newspaper, which critiqued middle-class and bourgeois reactionary values concerning woman’s role in the home, and purportedly influenced a Swedish government enquiry on housework that year. Sjöö spent a lifetime contributing articles about her travels, life and views to many different publications on women’s spirituality, feminist politics, as well as spending most of her time, meeting and exchanging views with other women. In 1950, Derkert helped to found the Socialist Women’s Group in Sweden. Sjöö was also active in founding significant women’s groups: the first Bristol Women’s Group and the Matriarchy Study Group (Ama Mawu) as well as lending her name to the foundation of many other radical Goddess and Pagan projects after the 1980s.

By 1967, however, in spite of her friendship with Derkert, Sjöö described herself as an ‘Anarcho-feminist’ as she took an active part in anti-Vietnam war projects in Stockholm from 1965. She further aligned herself with anarchists in Sweden and those who she met in USA in 1968, including the Bookchins. Her relationship with her third major partner, Keith Motherson (aka Paton) from the 1970s until the mid-1980s, has led to her being linked with the Alternative Socialism movement, seen as a fusion of ‘dissident Marxism with anarchism, socialism with libertarianism, Christianity with paganism, and reformism with revolution’. This characterisation seems the most accurate of her range of views and how they are held together as a philosophy for life. Sjöö also became a close friend of Pia Laskar, who edited Anarkafeminism (Stockholm, Federativs förlag 1992). In the UK, anarcho-feminists are often identified as radical feminists, especially if, as Sjöö did, they declare themselves lesbian or bi-sexual and live alternative lifestyles, setting up homes in communes or squats or even tipi/teepee villages. As Sjöö did, many anarchafeminists in Sweden define patriarchy in terms of a “co-operation of oppressions” (förtryckssamverkan). This term is not quite the same as “intersectionalism” today, even though both attempt to capture how class, race and gender mesh together in anti-essentialist or constructivist ways and the reason for this is because nothing in intersectionalism as a theory continuously opposes hierarchy. Intersectionalism only becomes effective as a political force when it is linked to specific campaigns for social justice and not “constructivism” or “identity politics” as something to “prove” or “establish” as a claim about a person or an artist. Anarchofeminism’s point about a “co-operation of oppressions” could, however, be seen not to take account of Audre Lorde’s famous essay, ‘There is no hierarchy of oppressions’ and return us to the problem of one frame - sexism/Patriarchy, class struggle/Capitalism, racism or xenophobia/anti-colonialism, for/against organised religion - as taking priority over any other perspective. This distinction does not undermine Kavita Maya’s important point about positionality and her critique of certain white feminist positions, as she tried to identify how to think about Monica Sjöö from the perspective of black feminisms and intersectionality today. As I’ve tried to show, Sjöö’s attention to the ‘co-operation of oppressions’ between spirituality, African foremothers and a critique of patriarchy in religion might take priority over her feminist critique of a Marxism defined only by class struggle, but maybe this only works if you ignore her activism in the peace movement and her long-standing interest in how ancient places of worship are linked to our spiritual place in the world. It is only by considering the politics of location in her art and writing, that her voice and its context come through and it is from here that we can speak about this in relation to a political practice and a complex life lived, rather than an identity/identitarian idea about her.

I’ve tried in this article to trace some of the links and connections of Sjöö’s life with her politics and to draw out the complex and varied appeal that her work now has for many different people. The Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective has been formed to study her work and has published its first zine (Legion Projects, 2022). There is much more to find out about the influence and impact of Monica Sjöö’s works and writings; this article is just a start.