Abstract

It is not uncommon for authors to write under a pseudonym, or for visual artists like Marcel Duchamp or Max Ernst to develop alter-egos that can allow for role playing. Alter-egos may also present themselves as archetypes that help to personally ground an artist’s creative output. Through her alter-ego persona of the "Kiln Priestess," an archetypal figure that she associates with the Western concept of the "Great Mother" as a kind of force of nature, Geiger-Ho has explored the notion of how her ceramic vessels and even the process of making them conforms to the Jungian author and psychologist and writer Erich Neumann's account of how pottery has been linked to the feminine essence of nature throughout human-kinds cultural history. Geiger-Ho’s archetypal figure is the deep-seated driving force behind the praxis of her artwork, which has expanded and evolved over her career to now include contemporary aspects of the eco-feminist movement. This paper examines the ways in which her eco-feminist views act as a conceptual framework for her new landscape photographs of raw clay formations and other natural potential ceramic materials that are located in the in the tiny Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam on the island of Borneo.