The pine is laminated in radiating segments, the way a wheelwright builds a wheel or a pattern maker builds a form, so that a disc this size cannot cup or split across the grain. That decision gets made before any carving starts. The nose on the bust is turned on a lathe. The eyes are perforated sheet metal, cut and inlaid. The name plates are aluminium, punched letter by letter by hand and riveted down. Four trades, none of them laboured.

Both plates read MADINNA, the same six letters on each piece, which makes it a name rather than a title for either. One letter from Madonna. The bust is a crowned woman, and a crown on a woman is Marian before it is anything else. What the maker meant by it we cannot tell you. The larger piece carries a second plate reading HELEN HEAVEN, and the only Helen Heaven we can find anywhere is a performer credited in a Los Angeles punk film of 1986, in a cast full of people who had renamed themselves. Whether that is this one we have no way of knowing. Beside the two plates sit a red crayon number, a masking-tape remnant and a pencil inscription down the centre seam, three separate systems of numbering. Nothing else about the maker survives.