The Queue: Ginny Sims

In a cramped basement studio in Minneapolis, Ginny Sims creates ceramic dishware haunted by the spirit of British pottery.

In The Queue, the ceramist and sculptor shares about connecting with fellow makers, meeting giants of British pottery, and what’s next for her in a new garage studio.

By Jon Spayde
September 9, 2026

Digital Only

Ceramics

Free To Read

Photo by Ginny Sims

Ginny Sims's dreamy ceramic objects and sculpture, like these two cups, carry the spirit of England's Staffordshire pottery tradition.

In a cramped basement studio in Minneapolis, Ginny Sims creates ceramic dishware haunted by the spirit of British pottery—particularly the products of the long-gone Staffordshire factories, which declined as northern England’s economic prospects faded. Her versions of these classics look off-kilter at first glance, but soon reveal a sensibility deeply attuned to the vagaries of history and the less comforting realities of life. These pieces—cups, mugs, vases, plates, teapots—have garnered her an international reputation, multiple awards, and brisk sales. Sims is also a sculptor, a painter, and a mother—and she’s finally refitting her garage into a decent-sized studio.

Photo by Ginny Sims

A Staffordshire-inspired pitcher, 10 x 8 x 6 in.

How did you come to ceramics?

In Little Rock, where I grew up, there’s a school at what’s now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and they offered ceramics, jewelry, and photography classes. I took all of those classes when I was a high school student, because there was no art class at my school.

Really, I could have chosen anything to give my life to, as a journey and a means of expressivity. I really enjoyed photography, for example, but there was something about ceramics that just piqued my interest. The ceramics teacher took us to her house one night, and I remember opening up her cabinets and seeing pottery made by all different people. At that moment I said to myself, “This is what I want. This is what I need to be a part of.”

But I think it was when I went to England that I decided to give my life to it. I studied with Mike Dodd, and he took me around to meet all these English potters. I was so lucky to meet Richard Batterham and Clive Bowen, Svend Bayer, and the descendants of the Bernard Leach family who are still making pottery. That was the moment when I thought, This can be a life.

Photo by Enrico Brunetti

Sims in her studio at the American Academy in Rome, where she was recently in residence as a winner of the Rome Prize.

Speaking of England, a main strand in your work is a very idiosyncratic take on Staffordshire pottery. What does that tradition mean to you?

It all started from seeing reproductions of the 18th- and 19th-century sketchbooks of the workers from the Leeds pottery factory. I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to see the originals. You could see the dirt and grease on the pages where they had turned the pages, and they were so worn. The handwriting was exquisite, and the drawings were fabulous.

Seeing those books made me cry. And it got me interested in factory ware, not mainly the pottery itself, but the whole history of its making. Then I went to the Staffordshire pottery locations—the six towns that make up Stoke-on-Trent, and these other sad northern industrial towns in England, where I was looking around thinking, This is like Detroit. This country has failed these people.

And so when people associate my work with Staffordshire and English history, I hope they know that I’m really trying to critique this capitalist, colonialist past and using that aesthetic to show how capitalism fails society.

Photo by Ginny Sims

Sims took this photo while traveling in post-industrial towns in England.

Photo by Ginny Sims

A spread from the Leeds Pottery Manuscripts, inspiration for Sims's Staffordshire-inspired aesthetic. "I visited these sketchbooks in a special room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was moved to tears with the handwriting, the oils from years of fingers flipping through," says Sims. "I loved the 2D rendering of the 3D object and ultimately, was moved to create work that could somehow mimic that feeling of those beautifully drawn pots."

What other contemporary craft artists have been important to you?

Among female artists who have families, as I do, there’s Phyllida Barlow, an English sculptor. She had six kids, and she taught for some 40 years. She made this phenomenal body of work when she came to an age where she had time to do it.

A ceramic artist I adore is Jean-Nicolas Gérard. I’ve visited him in France a couple times now, and actually stayed at his house and shared meals with him from his garden. He’s someone I look to as an inspiration for intertwining life, art, and eating. And another ceramic artist who I’ve long loved is Stephenie Bergman, who’s doing sculptural work with clay. We’ve been emailing for 20 years, and she’s invited me to use her studio in Morocco in the summers when she’s away, which is just—wow.

Connecting with other makers is an important part of your practice, no?

I find myself connecting with people similar to me who are, say, midlife mothers working from home, investing everything they’ve got into the thing they want to get out into the world, be it clothes, jewelry, or artisanal vinegar. I’ve formed a network on Instagram of like-minded people, and they’ve become my friends. I have a friend in New York with whom I stay, and we do little pop-ups, where she sells her vinegar and I bring my ceramics. We have a bit of an audience, you know? And that spreads to independent retailers, and we connect and do events with them.

More and more I’m becoming aligned, not just with other ceramic artists, but other makers in general. It’s a really good way to support our model of living and making.

Photo by Ginny Sims

A shallow ceramic bowl, 2.5 x 7 x 7 in.

“More and more I’m becoming aligned, not just with other ceramic artists, but other makers in general. It’s a really good way to support our model of living and making.”

— Ginny Sims

You recently returned from Rome, where you were one of the 2026 cohort of winners of the Rome Prize, given by the American Academy in Rome. How has that experience affected you and the future direction of your work?

In Rome I was in community with the other awardees—a poet, a composer and an Italian classicist, among others. I learned so much from their ways of learning, their inspirations, and their projects. I was blown away by the weird places they went with their scholarship.

In Rome, too, I was on the hunt for things to bring back to the studio: words and music and weird building materials that I couldn’t identify at the hardware store, and random pipes and bits of marble.

As for the future, pottery is so much a part of my artist DNA that I will never give it up. But I think the future—in my new studio!—is unbridled devotion to making sculpture and doing more paintings, too.

I love glass as a material, but I mostly don’t love glassware because it’s not wonky enough for me. But now I want to take a glassblowing class, because I’m seeing glassblowers, like La Soufflerie in France, who make works that are like pottery. You can tell they’re handmade. They’re full of flaws, and they’ve got life.

Photo by Ginny Sims

Sims's studio at the American Academy in Rome.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

See more of Ginny Sims's work online.

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