Elizabeth Mitchell, who died in 2010, lived and worked in Oxfordshire for fifty years. She studied at Yeovil School of Art, and then, for a short time, in Paris. In both places, drawing was ‘the foundation of our training and the life-blood of our everyday practice’.

In 1954 she moved to Woodstock, where she first showed work at the Oxfordshire Museum in an exhibition entitled Aspects of a City. In Oxford, demolition in St Ebbe’s was underway. Failing to capture the scene in a drawing, she turned to the rubble—to the fragments and small objects of ­domestic life that lay around. Unexpectedly, she began to see these ‘mute witnesses’ as material for art.

At a printmaking workshop at the Ruskin School of Drawing in 1974 she discovered new ways of exploring this rich trove. After experimenting with etching and ­lithography, she was introduced to collograph, in which a low-relief made of various materials is sealed, inked up and printed just like a metal plate. Its printing encompasses techniques of intaglio and relief printmaking, so recessed areas can be inked as they would be in an etching or engraving, then the raised areas of the collograph inked in different colours using large rollers.

Elizabeth's move to Oxford in 1991 was inspired in part by the promise of easier access to the now well-established Oxford Printmakers Cooperative, which, since its foundation, had been an inestimable source of help and friendship.

About Elizabeth's work Christopher Baker, former Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, said, ‘Elizabeth Mitchell’s constructions, collages and prints are thoughtful works of great complexity and sophistication. She finds discarded remnants of Oxford’s architectural and industrial heritage and gives them new life and meaning through intensely considered juxtapositions. Her creations encourage you to see beauty and interest in the texture, colour and patina of what are ostensibly the most mundane of objects: a scrap of wood, a shell or a fragment of a long forgotten mechanical device. This is poetic re-cycling.’