and this is why you don’t swallow chewing gum.

This recap is covered in marmite and my mother’s hair.

Abstract Records

For this week’s Main Make, we were revisiting sculpture with the potters being asked to create a sculpture of a Body in Motion, specifically their own bodies

and if having to wrestle with the actualisation of your own mortal form wasn’t bad enough – the sculpture also had to be ~personal~ which is reality TV speak for “the producers are holding a gun to your head, so you better drop a little traumatic tidbit or you’ll become a combustible!”

the sculptures could either be realistic or abstract, all you really had to hope was that the sketch artist could denote where at least one limb was on your sketch

Kayleigh’s Penrose Bouba Steps was definitely the most abstract, but the movement aspect came in terms of the fact she was hoping (key word: HOPING) to create it in such a way that would allow for it to stand on different points

which I did think was a really ambitious and unique take on the challenge. Naveed was also joining Kayleigh in a very pronounced form of abstraction – immortalising he and his family as Kirby, if he ate a roast turkey

at the top of the episode, it was mentioned that the potters had been given 18kgs of clay

and maybe as someone with cereal bowl blindness (a portion is what now?) I’m not the best judge of quantities but it didn’t seem like many of the potters had used *that much* clay? Naveed however… I look at Naveed’s and think “Yeah, that’s a 20kg turkey that feeds a family of four for at least a week and a half”

because he’d gone so big, he’d had to build it around a former, causing much drama when he had to pop the rectal balloon contraption keeping it agape

and discovered that the sculpture’s little feetsies were too wet to support the rest of its weight

and I thought Bill was going to have a similar fiasco when he started performing grievous spine removal on his self-sculpture with the skin-clay sort of flopping all over the place

I actually think a sculpture that makes a statement of its former removal would be really cool, Bill however was sealing it all up

my biggest concern for Bill was that his sculpture had the most stereotypically static pose

but OH BOY, did I resonate with his story about finding going from primary school to secondary school completely overwhelming and in hindsight realising a lot of it was because of my autistic traits (the gender stuff certainly wasn’t helping either)

Bill and I are the same age, I know FOR A FACT, the school system was NOT KIND (and still isn’t and is probably getting worse again, let’s be honest) to anyone that struggled due to neurodivergence – I was just sat in a small room on the one side of school with kids that were deemed “too badly misbehaved for classes” and made to do BBC BiteSize exercises while they threatened my parents with truancy laws. This episode, man… I’m just glad that Bill seems to have found a support system, outlets and direction that work for him. I really see a lot of myself in him and his strange little statue child

Fynn’s was also inspired by his own neurodivergence, representing his own creative self forming out of the “chaos” of ADHD and diving back into it as oftentimes, it’s in that state where he feels most creative

and during the firing process he was hoping to embellish the statue with patterns similar to his own, very cool, tattoos

which went down a lot better with Siobhan than Bill trying to tempt every stray cat in Stoke-on-Trent to Gladstone

as it turns out, the cat food is somehow really burying the lede of what Bill had actually packed in terms of combustibles.
Speaking of Siobhan, I think this episode really showed how good a host she actually is. It was clearly a very tense episode, not only is it a quarterfinal with the threat of a double elimination hanging over their heads, but the potters were unpacking childhood horrors, insecurities and traumatic childbirth stories. My hope is that the potters didn’t feel forced to go as deep and emotional as some of them did, the prompt did border on feeling a little exploitative. I do think Throwdown does a better job of handling that than most? The artistic nature of pottery lends itself better to representing and initiating a discussion about more sensitive subjects than say, gingerbread and chocolate ganache.
As for Siobhan, she engages with the potters so empathetically and kindly and I just liked when she made everyone do the yoga session, it felt like a tension breaker that everyone desperately needed

this was inspired by Angharad’s statue, itself doing a yoga pose

she’d focused entirely on the torso as that is what she feels has been deemed “unacceptable” and drawing particular attention to stretch marks that she’d further accentuate in the second firing with oxides.

Finally we have Elham, whose statue was a representation of her second pregnancy during which she experienced a traumatic C-section

the sense of movement came from both the pose and the scarf draped across the piece’s chest to emphasise the motion of pushing through something on-coming

AND THE RECAPPER HAS NOTHING ELSE TO ADD.

Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Throws

Apparently it was Body Part Week at Gladstone and unfortunately you can’t have them making ancient Greek dildos before 9pm (when will Bake Off make olisbokóllix? That’s a bread week you’ll never forget) so the Throwdown Challenge was somewhat more abstracted as the potters saw themselves having to make vases that featured “body parts” – a foot, waist, neck, lip and 2 bellies, making this technically an alligator

the biggest struggle for this was getting enough height in order to incorporate all of the features but also not raising it so quickly that Siobhan is summoned like the innuendo imp (impuendo?) on your shoulder

it was another stellar Throwdown Challenge for Bill who topped the leaderboard with a vase that was almost identical to Rich’s

and followed in second by his regular bridesmaid

my singular investment following the result of this episode is Team Flowerpot Men making the final – just the best boys, not to speak ill of anyone else, you’re all incredible but mum has favourites, ok?

Joining Bill and Fynn on the podium was Angharad who had managed to get some good height into her vase but struggled to give it much in the way of definition

and Kayleigh was sent into last place for producing the same barely-a-shape-vase but smaller

she was however praised for the symmetry and placement of her handles, something that Elham struggled a bit more with

not everyone is a born couturier for mice (Sewing Bee, I have an idea for you!)

but I do think Elham deserved higher than 5th for her vase which had all the key features and some very pronounced exaggeration

I would have maybe swapped her and Naveed, who had made a vase that looked like how it feels as a woman trying to buy jeans

admittedly it does get easier once you actually start filling them out

the oestrogen is going *great*.

An Official Body Vase Ranking:
1. Cinched For The Gods
2. Fynn’s Vase for the Bouquet
3. A Polite Cinching For A Cardinal
4. Naveed’s Impossible Quest for Jeans
5. Elham’s Askew Ape Index
6. Kayleigh’s Bodyless Vase

Statue of Limitations

The first stage of the refiring process was for the potters to apply the oxides and… favoured toast toppings, apparently, to their sculptures

as it turns out, Marmite is really good wig glue (9 out of 10 Drag Queens would not recommend – DON’T LISTEN TO HIM ELHAM)

it has been A LONG TIME since I’ve seen a more unfortunate head if hair than when when Jacob appeared out of nowhere in New Moon

No, where have *you* been, Loca? The cursed well?

And once Bill was finished experimenting in hair transplants and making the worst burrito you’ve ever had since Showgirls

they were all taken out to the courtyard to build their own kilns, resulting in a scene that looks like it ends with Astaroth breaking free from Hell and engulfing the world in fire and war… ok, more fire and war than usual

much like many a Christmas emergency, Naveed was struggling to make his roast turkey of a sculpture fit in the glorified oven and did have to take brick donations from other potters

his sculpture did have some cracks, particularly around the base, but despite the double firing, it still stood up freely and was in one piece

Keith and Rich weren’t entirely convinced that the space turkey reads as human when they looked at it and I was inclined to agree but then Naveed did a little pose and I see it and I support the whimsy

this was the second funniest camera shot this episode, the first being the crash zoom on the burnished orbs that immediately strike fear into your heart when you see them as you try and process what this is

I personally liked the contrast between the rough and smooth but much like Whitney making the smooth shark sculpture in Raku Week, this probably just wasn’t the place to do it because the judges REALLY wanted them to make use of the effect combustibles and oxides have on a burnished surface and the oxides just hadn’t melted into the rough surface.

Fynn also had some minor issues with the combustibles, his kiln hadn’t reached a hot enough temperature to fully melt the tin foil he’d wrapped it in

and while the contrast between the chaotic twisted parts of the sculpture and the smoother figure aren’t as pronounced as he would’ve liked, the sculpture still works

and I think he definitely got the best colour work – the soft blush pinks are really stunning. My favourite piece of combustible work (post-firing, because pre-firing it’s obviously Bill’s DIY hair transplant) was Kayleigh’s fern pattern

that’s REALLY pretty, unfortunately the design to get it to stand on different points hadn’t worked due to drying it on its side causing it to slump to one side meaning it sort of just lay there like a Mesopotamian Bop It

I’m sure Kayleigh probably knew her chances were scuppered the moment the core design feature hadn’t worked but I do think the patternation and pay off of the combustibles is somewhat redeeming and if she does find a way to weight it so that she can get it to stand more interestingly than on its side, it is a genuinely lovely piece of sculpture work.

I was slightly worried for Bill’s when he was taking it out of the kiln, both because it looked like they were unearthing a cursed object from the depths of the heretical Akhenaten’s tomb

and because it just looked very dark and my fear of it being a very static pose were not assuaged

the judges were fine with the pose and did feel like Bill had instilled it with an anxious energy, nor did they have a critique for the colouration so I’m going to guess it’s a piece that might translate better in person? That’s not to say I don’t like it, I think it’s bloody good I’m just not sure it quite counts for the “In Motion” aspect of the brief, which I think is ultimately why he probably didn’t get the win this episode? He certainly was in contention, as well as both Angharad and Elham both of whom had sublime statues. The entire process of Elham “meeting” her sculpture after the brick kiln firing was really lovely

and I hope it was as cathartic for her as it seemed to be because te sculpture is everything this challenge demanded and more

I was sceptical of how the fabric was going to come across and I’m blown away by how genuinely breezy it does actually look – and the fact she got the unique splotchy effect on it that adds to the patterned scarf look.
As for Angharad’s, it honestly looks like it could be in the same “collection” as Elham’s, I think they work beautifully together

there’s nothing to really critique – everything she aimed to achieve with it really worked. I was worried that it might look a little bit run of the mill and a bit like a sculpture you can buy, but I think the addition of the stretchmarks, especially in that melted copper, do add more of a statement and personalisation that the challenge was calling for.

I think the elimination this week was actually surprisingly simple, when it started I was worried because they were obviously going to eliminate two people – next week is Big Build Week and like FUCK are they ordering in an extra 45kg of clay because someone made Keith cry more than usual!
I do think Kayleigh and Naveed both had sculptures that, at least in the edit, came a lot less emotionally loaded and then both had either a technical issue or the judges were able to delicately question its adherence to the brief. So Kayleigh and Naveed fall just before the semi-final

after about week 4, I thought Kayleigh was nearing a dead certainty for the final so I am shocked to not see her there, and I’m gutted that Naveed never got that Potter of the Week because there were at least 3 instances where they could’ve given it to him!
Speaking of which, this week’s Potter of the Week was Angharad, chalking up her second win

I can’t really disagree with it truly, I think what she made in the Main Make was really lovely. However, I do think they could’ve given it to Bill and nobody would’ve questioned it, and we’d head into the Semi-final with everyone having at least 1 win. I do have faith in Bill doing quite well in the Not Bathroom Week Semi-final