Ginny Sims is an artist who works primarily in clay. She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and currently resides in Minneapolis, MN with her family. Craft arts, fine and contemporary arts are all, for Ginny, viewed through the lens of the history of pottery. Architectural elements, found objects and the human body offer material context for her sculptures and vessels. The human body’s proximity and intimacy is a consistent subtext in her work, an interplay she believes is intrinsic to working in clay forms. Conceptually she references both the industry and the craft of ceramics, as well as her own personal history, art history, economics and politics, noting the myriad ways these things have intersected through time. These composite narratives share a rubric across media of the disjointedness in things, a frailty underlying almost everything. These aspects are mashed up in the narratives and in the materials themselves. Ginny carries a strong curiosity for how creative practices overlap with acts of living – shared conversation, food, music, movement and so on. As a ceramic artist and sculptor, Ginny nudges the medium into places where form and function combine and blur, ever a reminder that pottery is a reflective, physical remnant of culture and of us.

Ginny apprenticed with potter Mike Dodd in Somerset, England and worked at potteries in Centola, Italy and Isle of Iona, Scotland. Living abroad in the UK and Europe, she found cultural validity in the work and lifestyles of artisan makers and committed herself to being a potter. She earned her MFA at University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she would later teach Ceramics. She has participated in internships and residencies at: Red Star Studios, Kansas City, MO; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; and the Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY. 

Ginny has received several grants and awards: McKnight Fellowship for Ceramic Artists (2022), Jerome Ceramic Artists Project Grant (2013, 2019), Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017) and Creative Support for Individuals Grant (2022), Jerome Foundation Study and Travel Grant (2016). She has exhibited in the US and Europe including shows at: Ofr. in Paris; Tiwa Select, Los Angeles; Hair & Nails, Minneapolis; Carbondale Clay Center, Carbondale, CO; Mast Books, New York City; and at The Shop Floor Project and Charleston Farmhouse in the UK. Ginny’s work has been featured in The Financial Times, The World of Interiors, Food & Wine, Vogue and Architectural Digest Italia. In 2023, Ofr. Paris published Un Vie de Terre, an artist book of Ginny’s work spanning over 10 years.