The Nivkh winter bear festival is not a performance. A bear is raised in a log cage, fed, teased, shot, dismembered and shared out, because the bear is the son of the master of the taiga and is going home. What survives in museum drawers is the material around that: ritual spoons, troughs, cage posts, birch-bark tues and stencilled bedding.

This system is built from those surfaces. Pale shaved wood and the inner face of bark as ground; every line a V-groove with a bevel that catches light on one flank; borders that scroll and return on themselves and end in a curl rather than a stop. Smoke darkens the recesses. The hand polishes what it grips.