Monica Sjoo, December 31, 1938–August 8, 2005, was a Swedish anarcho-feminist artist and writer, who spent more than half her life in England and Wales. Her 1968 painting God Giving Birth marks the start of second wave feminist art in the United Kingdom. It was controversial at the time, and was removed from several exhibitions. In 1971 she wrote the first Feminist Art Manifesto. She continued with paintings of goddesses, frequently associated with specific landscapes and sacred sites. Her paintings were large oil paintings, but she produced prints and postcards of many of them, which allowed people to have access to them. (Added 2024. After a period of neglect by the art establishment, the importance of her work is being recognised again in several exhibitions.)
Her small circulation 1975 pamphlet The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of Allwent through several incarnations, culminating in the influential 1987 book The Great Cosmic Mother, written in collaboration with Barbara Mor. Her later book New Age and Armageddonwas a critique of the patriarchal nature of much New Age thinking. She wrote several other books and contributed articles to feminist and pagan magazines. She was a founder member of the Matriarchy Study Group. In 1985 she took part in the women’s protest walk and accompanying rituals from Silbury to the American base at Greenham Common. In 1993 she organised and took part in a demonstration during mass at Bristol Cathedral, protesting against the Christian church’s misogyny and suppression of the Goddess.
The main website devoted to her is here and a display of small versions of several of her paintings is here. Her Wikipedia entry is here. Along with Asphodel’s archive (and also Jean Freer’s) her archive is held at the Feminist Archive South, which is part of the Special Collections at the library of the University of Bristol.
©Daniel Cohen
