Uprising Form, sculpted in indigenous elm displays Mitchell’s supreme sense of poise and optimism and has his characteristic purity of form.

Dating from 1954, the sculptor had been working alongside Barbara Hepworth for several years and it was during this period that some of his most important carved works were executed. He was elected chairman if the Penwith Society and was achieving much critical acclaim.

Patrick Heron wrote a lucid description of the essential nature of his work of this period. “A Mitchell is a form, usually a single rather streamlined form enclosed as it were by a single skin – but a skin, or surface which weaves and bends and buckles and stretches in a way so subtle, physically and dimensionally that it can be likened to an “organic form”…an art so subtle that it can never submit to analysis in mathematical or mechanical terms. In such art intuition and intellect are always inexorably interlocked”