Spring Ghosts: Making Art Against the Grain

It’s late spring here in the cool hills outside Canberra. The mornings are still sharp enough to see your breath, but by afternoon, the sun insists you roll up your sleeves. Blossoms cling like confetti to the orchard, tomatoes and zucchinis are jostling in seed trays, and I can almost hear the bees drafting blueprints for the season ahead.

And yet, when I scroll through my feed, it feels like I’ve slipped through a portal. Pumpkins. Ghosts in orange hats. Ceramic bats perched on mugs. The mood is all woodsmoke and falling leaves — autumn nostalgia that makes sense in Boston, but feels foreign here in Murrumbateman, where the air smells like fresh growth and the promise of summer storms.

This is the knot I keep bumping up against as a potter and as a human:

Do I make what feels authentic, or do I make what sells?

Because truthfully — following the trend is easy. Pumpkins in October will get the likes, the saves, the shares. They fit the algorithm. They fit the story the internet tells us we should be living. And when you’re a one-woman art business trying to carve out space in a world of endless scroll, the pressure to “fit in” is constant.

Comparison is the background noise of creative life in 2025. You don’t even have to look for it — it arrives, uninvited, every time you open your phone. Someone else’s perfectly styled product shot. Someone else’s viral reel. Someone else’s best-selling ghost mug. If I’m not careful, it can feel less like inspiration and more like a chorus whispering: You’re falling behind.

But here’s the harder truth: when we bend too far to meet trends, we risk losing the very thing that drew us to clay in the first place — the joy of shaping earth into something that feels ours.

So this year, I’ve chosen to make a ghost mug anyway. But not a autumnal pumpkin ghost. A spring ghost instead. Betty!

She wears a straw hat and clutches a packet of pumpkin seeds — because here in October, pumpkins are not harvested, they’re planted.

Making her felt less like following a trend and more like telling the truth. She’s playful, yes, but she is also grounded — literally, in our soil and season.

I won’t pretend it’s easy to choose authenticity in a world that rewards sameness. Going against the grain doesn’t just feel hard, sometimes it feels wrong. Like you’re the one who didn’t get the memo. Like you’re out of step with the dance everyone else seems to know.

But clay teaches me this again and again: pressure shapes us, but resistance defines us. A pot collapses without strength in its walls. An artist collapses without strength in her boundaries.

So if you ever find yourself scrolling and thinking you’re not enough — not fast enough, not trendy enough, not visible enough — I hope you’ll remember Betty, the ghost. Not the ones in a pumpkin hat, but the one blooming in spring. The one that remind us that authenticity has its own kind of power.

Because at the end of the day, art isn’t about fitting in someone else’s season. It’s about telling the story of your own.

P.S. I’m still rewatching Gilmore Girls every September, because some traditions are sacred.

Until next time,
Nawsheen, your friendly homebody artist from Murrumbateman.