GINNY SIMS

Ginny Sims has been attracted to, among many other things, the historical moment when the industrial era met with the longer time of folk traditions: “It symbolizes a lot of things: for one, a turning point towards craft being taken away from the hands of the people right at the moment of the Industrial Revolution in England. For me, I was so interested because of what England is as this colonial power. You can see these traces of propaganda, but with mistakes, and then the damage that it did to the population of the people in Staffordshire during the time of the Industrial Revolution, and how it continues up to this day.”

In our ongoing time of mass production and disposability, ceramic artists and other people in craft traditions have so much to offer the culture. Sims explains, “Industrial pottery isn’t really interesting to me. It’s all very refined, but it’s very boring. I’m interested in that window of time because it symbolizes power, but also loss, and also how vulnerable we are.” Her work holds the visibility of the human touch, of her own hands. Her painting technique on the surface of her objects suggests a light touch, a glancing moment, and a sensual tension between swiftness and permanence.

Story is part of our objects, both in their history—as aesthetics, form, and object—and what stories they can evoke. Sims says of her own work that she creates “functional and sculptural objects that are highly narrative,” and that her pieces are touchable and therefore allow for a tangible, bodied experience. Sims values how studying the past lets us come into contact with “the fabric of everyday life with living people. With ceramics, you experience part of people’s routines because, for example, everyone [in certain places] has a teapot.” Sims’ work comes across as a kind of love letter to these social experiences.

Explaining this element of her artistic growth, Sims relates that she ended up studying pottery in England somewhat by happenstance. While she’s “not giving her life to this whole concept” around the transition to an industrial era, she “just noticed it.” She says, “It became very interesting because I have this background in political science. All of my family is from the British Isles. I just ended up working in England and living there, and it became kind of part of my life more than I ever planned on it being. So it just made sense to sort of dig into that a little bit deeper. I liked the idea of using some of the motifs in my own pots because they’re already sort of loose or hastily made. I’ve just been working with that for the last five years or so—that same sort of nodding to that time and that place, thinking about some of the same things, and adding my own to it. Now it’s sort of morphing into other things, so it was like a launch pad.”