Pottery Throwdown 2026, Episode 2: Abstracted Bovoid

Every year since 2019.

How do you think my None Pizza, Left Beef bookend would’ve gone down?

Sorry this has taken so long to get out. I’ve not been having a great week and it’s hard to have felt passionate and excited to write anything. I will be rewarding myself with a take-away for pushing through eventually.

In My Beginning Is My Bookend

With the pottery wheel behind them, it was on to Slab Week, which is what I call the period of time between Christmas and New Year, as the potters were tasked with slab building a pair of bookends. A task hinted at in the intro by Siobhan and her butch lesbian twin, Sinead, who is literally just Bill pulling a Clarke Kent

as well as mandatory slab building, the bookends had to also tell us something about the potters, so it was a very good day for incredibly niche hobbies. Kaz definitely wins with her metal detecting

but I also greatly enjoyed Whitney’s fondness for re-enacting famous scenes from Eastenders

I’m gutted that Siobhan fumbled the response, because she is certainly Whitney’s real mother as long as he’s in Gladstone

she gave him a long talking to about going out only in a pair of shorts

wait until she introduces him to his new dad, The Wild Man of Orford

I deeply enjoy how whimsical and jolly Kayleigh’s version of The Wild Man looks

because a lot of them time he looks like Jake from Adventure Time after a 4 day bender

the real challenge for Kayleigh was managing to lay the hair of the Wild Man down without losing the shape of her build. And even with covering him in an entire Italian family-sized portion of clay spaghetti, he still had competition from Kaz’s rendition of her partner

she did at least seem to have enough time to refine and give the sculpture the full back and crack waxing of their life, she and Fynn can open up a niche spa together

ultimately leading Kaz to believe she maybe hadn’t done enough

but I think she just worked really quickly! She had more than enough going on to me with the detectorists on one side and a rabbit reenacting Stephen from The Traitors winning £1000

the only thing is that it maybe didn’t feel like the focus was on the slab built side of things? And maybe she could’ve built the ground up and done a sort of cross section of a treasure trove of Viking gold just out of reach of the detectorist? But I loved the humour of the hand reaching out the other side. There was also some concern on the slab building for Bill and how his seemed to be more of a sculpture

personally I just love that we’re eating good on the whimsical front – dogs with pool floaties! And Bill is of course eating good on the biscuit front

I’m hoping and praying that he makes it to Bathroom Week because I’m incredibly invested to see how he works a packet of Maryland chocolate chip cookies into a personalised sculptural bidet.

Bill and his dogs weren’t the only ones going for a day out to the seaside as Whitney was risking it big on the inherent eroticism of a tentacle

and we can ring the Wild Swimming Klaxon – my favourite annual occurrence on the GBBTBCU (Great British Baking Throwdown Bee Cinematic Universe)

I LOVED the very stylised almost pin-up aesthetic that Angharad was going for in her swimmer

I was a little more worried about Whitney’s and the fact the two sides of his bookends didn’t really feel like they hung together as well as most of the other potters’. It was a very vibes-based approach to thematics. I loved that he was doing the conical flasks as a reference to his job as ~~an arsonist~~ a chemistry teacher

but adding in the insects and the marine life kind of confused things (loathe as I am to look a gift tentacle in the… infundibulum?) and maybe he could’ve leaned more into the mineral / element side of chemistry with jutting rocks and crystals? but I get that he wanted to show off his love for macro photography

I still don’t know where the tentacle comes into it but maybe he’s very invested in the scientific mystery of the giant squid? Which is one of my greatest irrational fears, right up there with cottage cheese, children with balloons and dying in a peat bog. SPEAKING OF WHICH, Emily announced that her bookend was going to be a Peat Hag

and me, a plebeian whose knowledge of conservation ultimately comes down to watching Springwatch with half an eye, fully thought that Emily was bookending a bog body and I was EXCITED! One of my favourite things in the world are the HORRIBLE reconstructions of the Girl of the Uchter Moor that look like Ed Gein throw pillows

you better believe that if you reconstructed my face with all the quality control of the BBC turning a Roxanne Pallett into a 90 year old woman in 2016, I would come back to haunt you forever

as it turns out, a Peat Hag is sadly not a mummified corpse (but it’s going to be in my D&D campaign now) and is instead an eroded mound of exposed peat. So Emily’s bookends told the story of peat bog restoration with one side being the bare hag and the otherside being a biodiverse restoration

I enjoy the well-meaningness of the piece but the illustration had me worried that it might look really flat and a little unclear in the end. But I had the same fear for Kayleigh and just how much green she had going on with her hairy wet man

and Mark was in a similar boat with the, well, Green Man making up a significant portion of his build

Mark’s was by far and away my favourite concept of the entire episode and one of those things that made you realise that you aren’t nearly interesting enough to be cast on a TV show. But I should’ve known that Mark was into Druidism, you don’t get a beard that glorious without honouring the Old Gods

Mark was also going for a riskier technique, while the other potters were all sculpting their bookends separately, Mark was making it as one piece and then slicing it in half at the end – a process that Siobhan was not helping with

make yourself useful and get the man some emergency biscuits for the anxiety!

Mark’s bisection of the Druidic Mound went smoother than I think the producers really wanted it to considering we had like three camera angles of the whole thing unfolding. How dare you all be competent potters who know what they’re doing!?

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT! Obsessed with the fact that on top of his sledge team of dachshunds, Fynn also has a chameleon and some sort of mystery reptile that you don’t know about because it goes to a different vivarium

next year I’m making a Pottery Throwdown Pet Bingo Card so if you’re thinking of applying next year please go adopt a tarantula, one of those gargantuan rabbits or take up falconry. But please remember, pets aren’t just for slice of life VTs.
The foci for Fynn’s bookends were a gecko and some dart frogs

and the plan to break up the brown monotony of the tree with various tropical plants was a really good idea too.

With a slab building assignment, naturally buildings were going to be a popular choice. Both Andrew and Elham were going the architectural route with Andrew getting all of 20 seconds of screen time to talk about Beverley Minster

and Elham creating Saadi’s Memorial Tomb of Equality

I got the distinct feeling that Elham probably had more to say about her focus on equality beyond a broad brushstroke but this is a lighthearted entertainment show and you shall only be rewarded for whimsical puns until the moment your trauma becomes relevant in the Trauma Week sculpture challenge

Naveed’s dedication to dad jokes is truly admirable – much like Bill, I hope he too makes it to Bathroom Week because I want to see the punny bidet… the Nav-idet?

Brick and Mortar

This week’s second challenge was more of a literal Throwdown as the potters found themselves having to make 10 bricks and lay them into a herringbone pattern. Kaz may have come last in the Bricklaying Championships because as it turns out finishing off your bricks like you’re trying to make your slowly melting cake stay together on Bake Off is an illegal clay manoeuvre

however, she did take gold in the unofficial strength test of the episode, measuring a good 7.6 on the Gladstone Rich-ter Scale

and was taking out Andrew in the process with a headshot that’d make the average Fortnite streamer jealous

as you can imagine, it was a very messy process with both Naveed and the lighting fixture above Bill looking like they’d been crawling through the trenches together

Naveed ended up coming in second with Bill languishing away in the bottom 3 forcing him to turn to something harder than a hobnob

where he was joined by KAZ SMASH! and Angharad showcasing my biggest barrier to entry into the pottery hobby

she’s braver than the troops in my eyes.

The revelation of the episode was Mark who was almost certainly a brickie in a previous life

and I was also genuinely impressed with how well Elham did as she just missed out on the top three to Whitney who I was very relieved did so well here because ultimately this was a week that the judging of the second challenge really mattered in.

An Official Tessellated Bricklaying Ranking:
1. Mark’s Path Life
2. Naveed, There’s a Pathfinder Pun In Here Somewhere, Help!
3. Whitney’s Brick Red-emption
4. Elham’s Serving Brick
5. Kayleigh
6. Fynn’s Perfectly Average Brick
7. Emily
8. Andrew’s Kaz-induced Head Trauma Did Him In
9. Bill’s Brickscuits
10. Whoever Fidns Angharad’s Nail Wins 1 Year of Good Luck
11. The Incredible Hulk’s Ineffective Paving Method

The Bookend of the Line

Back to their main makes and the potters were having to glaze and decorate their bookends ahead of having them tested against the demonstrative pile of vertically challenged books

in the end, everyone’s bookends managed to keep the books correctly wrangled. The only one I was slightly worried about was Whitney’s because his looked like they used significantly less clay than everyone else’s

but ultimately they did work and the extra functionality as vases was a really inspired design choice

however, aesthetically they sort of lurch all over the place like the average conversation with a 5 year old boy in which you end up discussing the mysterious behemoths of the deep, bugs, fungi and Ancient Egypt with Yu-Gi-Oh as the main reference point

and all of this happens within the space of 3 minutes without a breath having been taken. The sealife side of things was definitely the stronger half purely because the whole piece meshes together whereas the opposite end is sort of just a collection of little guys. I’m also yet to be convinced of anyone making a butterfly out of clay

if there is one thing in this world that is completely antithetical to the concept of how clay works, it is undoubtedly the butterfly. Maybe a scarab would’ve blended the secret egyptian interior better into the concept? But maybe that’s a mystery for the benevolent ghost of Jean-Francois Champollion. RIP, you would’ve loved the Yami Yugi arc.

Coming back to their bookends following their first firing, only Angharad was the one to face a slight calamity with her swimmer having fallen victim to the Great White Kiln Shark

but in the end, while the crack was still visible, she’d really managed to pull off a very successful limb reattachment surgery

I just really love this style and the proportions of everything are just absolutely perfect. Which is what I also really loved about Kayleigh’s, I could very easily see Angharad’s and hers on the same bookshelf of your ever expanding collection of books you’re unwilling to admit you’ll never read

Kayleigh deserves some real props to pulling this off so well. There *maybe* could’ve been more of a difference in hue between the hair and the face but it’s still all a lot more legible than I had anticipated it turning out for a piece that is almost exclusively one colour. AND THE FISH! Just truly excellent Little Guys™

it was quite a good episode for Little Guys™ actually with the best of them being either Kaz’s mole

or Andrew’s Mystery Quadraped

it’s giving Lascaux horse

and who knows, maybe Beverley Minster is sat right on top of the Paleolithic Cistine Chapel 2: Unga Bunga Boogaloo

the way he did that stained glass is really clever and extremely effective and compliments the abstracted bovoid in the foreground. But where Andrew embraced abstraction in both stained glass and pastoral mammals, Elham was biting off hell of a task with her literal recreation of the repetitious symmetry of Middle Eastern architecture

and for the sheer scale of the task and the amount of time she could realistically dedicate to doing it, I think she did a remarkable job

I was worried that Keith and Rich would think it maybe a little too stark but I’m glad they got the look that Elham was going for. I was more surprised by how into Emily’s Hag they were

but maybe Keith just found his hole that was made for him

the left side being a bit of an eyesore is kind the whole point so it’s a tricky one to critique. I just think it needs a tiny bit more characterisation to bring it fully together with the other side? Maybe some sort of conservationist doing… conservationist things? Because to me, as it is, it’s kind of like if Kaz had done her metal detectorist bookends without the metal detectorists

what Emily’s did undoubtedly have going for it was that hers was very obviously a slab built piece in which the slab build was inherent to the construction whereas Kaz’s slab build was kind of just… there as a means to an end?

however, full props to Kaz for the glazing treatment on the tree bark, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone on this show achieve quite such a realistic effect before

and that’s not to diminish her gonad tickling prowess

what a terrible Sophie’s Choice we faced this week as the two potters up for elimination were unarguably the two with the greatest habit of saying the most unhinged things.

Bill’s slight lack of ambitious slab building was ultimately forgiven because Keith has never seen a dog that hasn’t melted his heart

they are stupidly adorable – I wish the colours maybe popped a little more but you know, dog in a hat

the heart wants what the heart wants, you are foolish to deny yourself whimsy. Give in and take a bite of the forbidden fruit of fancifulness… the Nav-acado

the realism Naveed managed to achieve in the glazing of his avocado is quite honestly insane and on top of that, the pieces still fit together perfectly!

it was just a really well thought out piece with the angling of the halves so that you could see the interior while using them as bookends

I’m still kind of surprised he didn’t get Potter of the Week given how well he did in both the main make and the brick laying. Unfortunately, Mark’s bookend wasn’t quite as successful as his brick slamming, the glazing just turned out a little too muddy and lost some of the finer details which is a real shame because the actual sculpt is phenomenal

it does look rather a lot like Oscar the Grouch as well

but you know that if there was a Muppet production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Oscar is The Green Knight, Kermit is Gawain and Miss Piggy (wearing different wigs) is both Morgan le Fay and Guinevere.

Lastly we have Fynn whose vivarium themed bookends were both very good

the frog and gecko are great but there’s something about his treatment of the bromeliad that just looks exceptionally good

and I kind of like that his pieces kind of worked independently as well as when pushed apart

but maybe that’s because I know that I probably cannot be trusted with a pottery bookend because my bookcase wobbles precariously if you don’t tiptoe past it.

An Unofficial Bookend Ranking:
1. Bravacado for the Navacado
2. The Hot and Hairy Man of Orford
3. Oscar The Grouchy Green Man
4. Bill’s Dog Biscuits
5. Fynn’s Reptile Functionality
6. Angharad’s Shark Attack Survivor
7. Elham’s Tomes and Tombs
8. Andrew’s Cow-thedral of Las-cow
9 Just Another Bottle Cap
10. Whitney’s Just Doing This Now
=. Bogged Down and Haggard

It was quite a tight race for potter of the week at the top of the leaderboard. I thought Naveed had edged it just with how well rendered and perfectly the two pieces managed to fit together but I absolutely won’t fight them over giving it Kayleigh for the thoroughly charming take on The Wild Man of Orford

given how it could’ve ended up with using just green, she did phenomenally well.
The bottom two was a little odder for me, I didn’t vibe with Emily’s however I can admit the actual build of it and her technique was sound and not deserving of being eliminated (and was actually being considered for Potter of the Week by Rich and Keith – art, it’s fun and subjective!) so ultimately it was down to Whitney and Kaz which is a DAMN SHAME because their rapport with Siobhan has been a real highlight over the last two weeks. Ultimately it was Kaz going home in possibly the most Kaz fashion you could imagine