Acts of Creation engages both head and heart. The exhibition asks us to think about how ‘the image of motherhood changes when the artist is drawing on lived experience’ and ‘what challenges are levelled at motherhood as an institution through which the mother is idealised as self-sacrificing, wholesome, tireless and uncomplaining.’ Divided into four loose (if overlapping) colour coded thematic sections—Creation, Maintenance, Loss, The Temple—the exhibits take us on a journey, engendering a conversation with viewers….

Carl Phillips has written of art that it is motivated by a ‘restlessness of the imagination’, not as ‘adversary but as opportunity, not as an object of fear but, for better or worse, an object of an all-but-impossible-to resist fascination.’ In this essay, Gail Low reflects on her own encounter with Chimera , an exhibition of new and existing work by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer at the Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee.