My father, Gustav Sjöö, was from a poor peasant/working class background, the youngest of ten children. That he was able to train as an artist at all was a miracle and it was in the art school in Stockholm that my parents met. They went on to the Art Academy together and when they left from there they got married, much against my grandparents wishes.

For three years we lived in Växjö in the south of Sweden close to where my father's extended family lived in the countryside. My parents painted side by side, lived in a tiny place in an attic where there were no cooking facilities, bath or hot water. I remember the smell of turps and paint but not of cooking. I suffered from a lack of vitamins but half rotting oranges stored in our backyard saved me from scurvy. My parents were totally unpractical and my father basically didn't want me around.

My mother divorced him when I was three years old and we went back to live in Härnösand where my mother kept us both by painting portraits. I was however, the favourite subject of her art.

I loved the north with its great forests, rivers and thousands of lakes. I delighted in the winters with the crisp cold and the abundant snow, when we skied and skated and built snow houses. I loved the white nights around midsummer when it was light all night. All my best memories are of my childhood in the north and the summers up there on a farm where my grandparents were able to hire a cottage for us to live in.

When I was five I wanted to become a farmer and my first loves were cows, great gentle maternal beings who suffer badly and dogs, I milked the cows and helped with the haymaking. I thought I was a dog and had total telepathic communication with them.

I was until then a pretty and gracious child who was always dancing and singing but now I became awkward and put on weight and became self-conscious. I remember though at this time having premonitions in a waking dream of what I would do in my future life and I knew that somehow I had a destiny and a mission to fulfill.

Misery struck however, when my mother decided to move to live in Stockholm thinking that this would good for her career as an artist since she had studied and thought that she had friends there. This was however, a very great mistake. We got trapped in a tiny flat in a very dull neighbourhood on one of Stockholm's many islands. My mother never made the contacts she had been dreaming of and for the rest of her life she lived in poverty and obscurity although she was a talented artist. Meanwhile, my father who was much tougher than my very sensitive mother, had made it as an artist and received a lot of respect for being a peasant artist and true to his background.

It hadn't always been so. Matisse was the flavour of the day when my parents studied at the Art Academy and only bright primary colours were acceptable then. My father, however, who loved the land and the peasant cottages of his childhood, used earth colours and painted the world he knew well. He was rubbished during many years as being 'unaesthetic and crude' in his art. When he became famous however, after a major exhibition, the very same critics, who had put him down, now wrote that he was a great and original colourist. My father thought precious little of the class biased art world and its art critics and favouritisms, the 'malestream' art world as I call it. This knowledge stood me in good stead when I myself became the target of criticism and put downs for being a feminist artist.

I am proud of this side of my father but not of the fact that he competed with my mother when they lived together and hindered her career. My mother always said to me "don't become an artist, it is nothing but poverty and misery but if you do never marry another artist". She had seen many of her contemporaries, women artists who had been her friends, becoming the hostess in a male artist's home, having breakdowns and/or ending up in mental hospital. Her best friend, the talented writer Eva Meander, went into a lake and drowned herself even though she had had two books published.

My mother knew of no tradition of women artists in the past and felt alone and isolated while my father, in spite of his class background, bought into the myth of the male artist genius and compared himself to artists such as Goya and Delacroix. He said, like Renoir, that he painted with his prick and bragged to me about how he slept with the women who posed for him in the nude. I was twelve years old by then and spent summers with him watching him at his easel in all weathers painting in wild and beautiful locations on the east coast of Sweden. Around that time I remember coming across a book on William Blake's art in my father's studio and I was awestruck by its visionary quality.

In Stockholm my mother would take me along to see great exhibitions on Surrealism, Cubism, Italian Futurism etc. and the one that made a particular and lasting impression on me was the one of Mexican art. It was enormous and showed Pre Aztec and massive Aztec sculptures, Catholic art and the vibrant revolutionary paintings by Diego Rrvera, Frieda Kahlo and other artists. I was 15 years old at the time.

Living in Stockholm was however a misery for both of us. We were treated more or less as immigrant families are today. I spoke with a strong north country accent and wore plaits, a country girl. I was also naive and had a strong sense of justice. My mother wasn't able to tell a lie to save herself. My mother used to be mistaken for a gypsy. She had high cheekbones, work colourful clothes and headscarves and in the summers developed a high red brown skin colour. We were treated in a racist way and were ostracised. No girls were allowed to come and play with me in my home. I had to go to a school where there were 36 children in each class. I played truant and refused to go to school a lot of the time. My mother feared that social workers would take me away but what saved us is that I had a good head and did well in school in spite of the many absences. My mother had a fear all her life of people in white coats. She had spent many years in and out of hospitals as a child because she had been born with her feet turned inwards. She feared doctors, hospitals, and social workers. She walked with a bad limp and had pain in one deformed foot every step she took. She was a tall and strong, very beautiful woman who I loved very dearly. She was a dreamer, a natural anarchist and feminist. She detested all things "feminine" and never ever forced gender thinking on me, I was allowed to be and to find my own ways. My mother confided in me and I knew what she felt: her pain at not being able to paint as she needed to do because of poverty, her humiliation when treated with disrespect, the assumption at the time, being that women were ignorant and unknowing.

From early years I had to protect my mother against harsh unrealities and this made me much tougher than her. To be able to survive I had to lose some of my own innocence and became streetwise. I felt deprived, living in an urban landscape of concrete and ugliness. My parents were both nature mystics and this should have been my heritage too. Of course it was there in me but remained hidden during may years. My mother though used to draw for me the trolls she "saw", magical nature beings who are neither good nor bad and who could be as large as the mountains or as small as a pebble. There are moss-covered boulders everywhere in the northern boreal birch and pine forest and the legend goes that  they are trolls petrified by the sun. If a troll is caught out by the sun it either bursts or becomes a stone. Were the trolls an ancient Moon-worshipping people? I was especially entranced by the Huldra, or Queen of the forest, a goddess vilified by the Christians who demonised her. She is portrayed as a beautiful naked woman with long golden hair who lures lonely men to their death in the forest. Her backside however is a mass of rotting wood. She is the forest personified, a giver of life and death, of purification and of rebirth. A Nordic Kali figure or perhaps ancient Hel, who dwells in the mountains and cliffs, the most ancient Mother of the Nordic peoples.

So, my mother was a shamanic woman who belonged by a deep lake in the deep forest with me by her side. We were rebels together and she was an original dropout long before the 60's hippy era. She was an unsupported mother.