Monica Sjöö and the Goddess

questioning the legacy

Detail from ‘Glastonbury Zodiac’ Monica Sjöö

In the exhibition catalogue for Monica Sjöö’s exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the artist Lucy Stein confesses to some misgivings about Sjöö’s work that I share about their sometimes crudely illustrative style, her use of primary colour. But as Sjöö herself said ‘everything must be put under debate’ and this week, as I delve further into her work on ‘the goddess’ I have many questions for her around gendered essentialism and fetishisation of the mother figure and whether that still serves us in the present moment.

I’m also curious as to why she put a drawing of the Celtic mother goddess relief into her painting ‘Glastonbury Zodiac’ (1994) when they were so strongly associated with Bathwick where they were found. Statuary from the mother goddess cult has been unearthed primarily at Bath and Cirencester in the Cotswolds (other than one other statue at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, presumably deposited there by a Roman solider) and I’ve spent some time exploring this legacy and the deeper time of our ancient local past and forgotten women’s rites and rituals - it is intriguing to me that she would be so seemingly imprecise about the placement of this schist relief in the painting.

Schist Celtic mother goddess relief, from the collection at the Roman Baths at Bath

However, as Lucy Stein points out in her mini essay in the catalogue, sacred sites are social spaces and weird, or unexpected things happen in them all the time. She also wonders if the ‘abrasiveness’ of Sjöö’s work challenges the banalities of society’s view of artists and their role. ‘Her invocations of the Goddess operate vertically, diving and soaring through feminist consciousness and geopolitics and like the sacred sites, they encourage us to see the mythic in the quotidian. Her works connect us with times and places when women could journey freely in the spiritual realm.’

Shift
JLM Morton 

They stunned me with the force 
of a shifting age. Like asteroids, 
farming, the internet. Mother goddesses,
a sacred three in the hot displays at the 
Roman Baths. To my shame, I gasped. 
I almost cried, while tourists hustled 
for selfies with the Gorgon’s Head and 
the Façade of the Four Seasons. I was
roped to the spot by an invisible line to 

the votive relief in the glass. Carved 
grey schist - hard yet brittle - the workings
of the sculptor still visible and Celtic, here 
before the Romans. Three mother goddesses 
with naked breasts, their pleated skirts, the tilt 
of movement in their smooth round heads. 
Linked together arm in arm – more sisters 
than mothers. 

Driving home I caught sight of the familiar
line at a high point on the horizon – 
beech trees planted in perfect definition 
with the light behind them. The escarpment 
from an era when mountains formed 
and the forests became coal and carboniferous 
rock – or schist. How like the rings of trees
were the heads of the mother goddesses. 

How like the curvature of the earth. 
The gravity of our home place holding us here.
They and I at different ends of this vanishing 
human season. Arms linked, heads tilted 
in whispers and - haven’t we danced.

‘The goddess returns…’ Monica Sjöö

#mothergoddess #romanocelt #romanbaths #celtic #ritual #rites #sacred