‘Oh yes, the Anglo-Irish Beales with the emphasis strictly on the Anglo,’ said Ryan. ‘They put me on to the Nolans, who introduced me to Stephen, and down I went into the very bowels of the earth. I watched him make a fruit bowl, a really plain boring fruit bowl. He shaped the clay, he let it dry and in the kiln it went.’ Ryan grinned. ‘You know they run their kilns on pig farts? Very modern, but we’re talking secret subterranean race here so I’m expecting something a little bit more than pig farts.’ He wagged a finger at me.

‘I know you know what’s coming next, because I saw the way you reacted to the work at my show.’ He folded his arms. ‘Oh, the herd felt something. But you, you recognised it.’

‘Magic,’ I said.

‘The real thing,’ said Ryan. And like me, once he’d seen it in action there was no way he wasn’t going to try to learn it. So Stephen set out to teach Ryan how to make an unbreakable pot, and incidentally imbue it with enough vestigia to give any interested art lovers what Ryan called a ‘Glimpse into the numinous’. What he hadn’t counted on was that learning how to do it would take months.

‘But I’ll bet money you know that already, don’t you?’ said Ryan.

Stephen described the process to Ryan as singing a song in your head while you worked. You worked the clay, sang the song in your head and somehow that made it magical.

‘Month after month I was down there, drinking tea, fondling the clay and singing in my head,’ said Ryan. ‘But being an artist is like being a shark – you’ve got to keep moving or you drown. So I asked Stephen to make the faces, the ones you saw at the Tate, to my specification, and that’s what he did.’

‘How did you get the emotional content?’ I asked. ‘And what did Stephen get in return?’

‘I just told him to think about how each face made him feel. Imagine my surprise when they popped out of the kiln emoting like actors.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Stephen got paid.’

I asked him whether that wasn’t cheating, but he just sighed in an exaggerated way and told me not to be so bourgeois. ‘I didn’t make the mannequins either, or any of the other found objects I used. Art’s about producing something more than the sum of the parts.’ He waved his hand dismissively and I thought, You’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

‘And James Gallagher arrived around this time?’ I asked.