This is the work of one named maker. Incised into the underside is his mark, DIMU, for Dieter Muckenheim, a German emigrant to Canada who carved out of the Parry Sound region of Ontario and is understood to have died there in the 1990s.

It should be met honestly, because the ground it stands on is real and contested. Muckenheim was a settler working in the Inuit carving tradition, and the mid-century market was thick with non-Indigenous makers borrowing that language for the tourist trade, sometimes clumsily, sometimes in ways that took from Inuit artists without credit or return. That history is not brushed over here. This is not an Inuit work and it is not sold as one.

What sets Muckenheim apart is how he came to it. The account passed down is that he learned to carve directly from Inuit carvers, fellow patients during a long spell in hospital, and there is no reason to doubt it. It reads as the honest origin of a man who fell for the form and then gave decades of his life to it, working from affection rather than opportunism.

Taken on its own terms, as the signed work of a named carver with an unusual life, it is a quietly satisfying object, a whale in smooth grey steatite, the form sure and economical, worked by a German hand in Ontario and carried since to the far side of the world.