Mellis was encouraged to experiment with collages and constructions by her friend, the artist Ben Nicholson. His family lived with Mellis and her husband in St Ives at the start of the Second World War. These new works forced Mellis to ‘think in a different way, not in colour which was natural for me.’ This relief is somewhere between a painting and a sculpture, as it is constructed using wood of different colours and textures. She has used both geometric and natural shapes: we can see this in the egg shape in the centre, which has been divided by a triangle.