Monica Sjoo by Rupert White

Monica Sjoo by Rupert White.

This book is a condensed diary for Monica Sjoo, presented after a useful introduction about her life and work's contribution to art, feminism and Godess worship, so that it takes a sort of headlong rush through her life. After a while I really liked this dash through the years as I came across lots of names I knew and events I had been to and the whole era was evoked with all the earnest and

changing enthusiasms of youth. I found I was in 1982 at the demonstration against the US at Greenham 'Embrace the base' in which Monica Sjoo was also participating.

It is clear that Monica Sjoo found her kind of feminist spiritual belief must be linked with political action. She was very keen on ecology, leftwing trends, anti war protest and her own bisexuality.

She put a lot of energy into exhibiting widely and going to speak in several different countries.

Somehow she endured through the grief of the death of two of her three sons when they were quite young, killed one by a car hitting him and one by cancer. She then went onto suffer herself from cancer but went on contributing to events indomitably.

I do not particularly like Monica Sjoo's art in its highly stylised form, strangely similar in some ways  to socialist realism say in Diego Riviera's murals, but with a love of Neolithic monuments and belief that there were pre patriarchal religions that revered goddesses. My own feminism rejects idealising a list of the 'feminine' qualities although the idea that once in Crete images of women were worshipped I find an exciting probability that emphasises the cultural construction of patriarchy that came after.

'God giving birth' was an important work by Sjoo, first shown in St.Ives,1970, often seen as controversial and used many times in various publications. Her book, 'The Great Cosmic Mother' was named by Alice Walker as her favourite work of literature and I now want to take it out to read again.

I found out a lot about Sjoo from Rupert White's researches and I ended up respecting her wide ranging work and realising that it amounts to more than I had thought before.