Emma Kohlmann first encountered Monica Sjöö on Tumblr. Sjöö’s surreal watercolors of priestesses and excerpted passages from her writings on the divine feminine were popular on the “Goddess” streams of the mid-2010s. Sjöö’s 1971 book The Great Cosmic Mother is credited as one of the first to argue for Indo-European societies’ widespread devotion to fertility goddesses and the possibility of convergent pre-capitalist matriarchy.
Kohlmann is explaining Sjöö’s text to me and how it informed her latest show while we sit on a checkerboard teal couch in a corner of her lofted studio in western Massachusetts. On the coffee table in front of us are stacks of catalogues, a handful of zines and a biography of Francis Bacon. She walks me through her recent haul from nearby Grey Matter Books (“I get everything from their Occult section”), which includes a text on the Holy Grail from The Illustrated Library of the Sacred Imagination, a series she collects in her library of mysticism and arcana.
For Kohlmann’s recently closed solo exhibition with Silke Lindner, “Moon Minds,” she turned toward The Great Cosmic Mother and the images that it rendered. In the gallery, there were new paintings by Kohlmann and a large grid of watercolors covering one wall. In front of them was a bench made by Kohlmann, inscribed with a patchwork of wood-burned figures in adjoining squares. Many of the works in the show follow the logic of quilting; in two large paintings, tessellating diamonds contain individual worlds of distorted anthropomorphic figures among flora and fauna.
“Moon Minds” is the name of one of the later chapters in The Great Cosmic Mother. In it, Sjöö describes how, across much of the ancient world, time was intensely connected to the body and the moon. In these societies, Sjöö claims, women kept time, their menstrual cycles aligning with the phases of the moon, the word menses rooting back to the Latin word for month. Kohlmann explains to me that the show is obviously not about periods but is interested in the idea of the body as timekeeper.
This concept was especially present for Kohlmann during the beginning of the pandemic, and we spoke about how everyone had to impose structures of time onto themselves, creating their own strangely regimented systems to do so. Every day, for weeks in a row, Kohlmann and her sister Charlotte would climb the same nearby mountain.
In “Moon Minds,” a watercolor depicts two ungendered figures staring blankly outward, leaning on the external columns of a person-sized hourglass. In The Sands Are of the Times, the hourglass’s sand is painted in a drab olive; the piles of sand in the top and bottom of the glass feature un-emoting faces, both tilted horizontally, as if in these times there is no difference between the past and present—the sand moving from the top to the bottom, unchanged.
Standing next to a printed image of a Roman coin with the twinned face of Janus on it, taped to a column in Kohlmann’s studio, we talk about her impulse toward doubling. In “Moon Minds,” there is a multitude of twinned imagery: pairs embrace, staring blankly outward, or emerge from leaves and flowers. Kohlmann will often create the same image twice, once in watercolor and once on canvas. For Kohlmann’s catalogue that accompanied her recent ceramics collection with the Danish design company HAY, she wrote, “My creative process is inherently iterative. I produce numerous versions of each design, constantly refining and revisiting ideas.”
The same figures—trees and moons, smiling candelabra-shaped flowers, non-human animals that exist somewhere between a lamb, a dog and a cow—appear across Kohlmann’s work over the past decade, and in “La Pittura,” the collection with HAY, they are merged with designs inspired by the historic and ancient painted ceramics in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.
As she prepared work for her HAY collection and the Silke Lindner show, Kohlmann returned to the phrase the world was born in a cup. At the beginning of Sjöö’s The Great Cosmic Mother, “it talks about the first period of the world being this prehistoric water and how it just became cellular, and then it became humans,” Kohlmann described in a recent interview, saying, “I just loved the idea of something holding the world.”
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