Ginny Sims

Ginny is a studio artist and mother who works primarily in clay. She often incorporates other materials and found objects in her installations for supportive context for her sculptures and vessels. Ginny has worked at potteries in Centola, Italy, and Isle of Iona, Scotland. She has exhibited at numerous galleries in the US and Europe and has held solo shows at 0fr in Paris, France and Hair and Nails gallery in Minneapolis, MN. Ginny has been the recipient of numerous grants including Jerome Foundation Study and Travel Grant (2016), Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017), Jerome Ceramic Artists Project Grant (2013, 2019), McKnight Fellowship for Ceramic Artists (2022). Most recently Ginny was awarded the Mark Hampton | Henry W. and Marian T. Mitchell Rome Prize.

Her work often references different moments in ceramic history and incorporates the cultural information she finds there with present day social and political experiences. Her vessels and sculptures acknowledge that pottery is a reflective, invisible, critical and, for millennia, necessary material object of culture. Because the history of pottery in the west is divided between industrial capitalism and folk craft traditions, and its objects are so intimately involved with the body either in its creation or its use more than any other medium, Ginny believes it can bring into dialogue aspects of the capitalist system, the body and domesticity in a palpable, straightforward way that other mediums cannot.