Why Abstract Art Doesn’t Need to Tell a Story
In conversation with Julia McGhee
What happens when you bring avant-garde, shape-shifting live art to a remote village in the Scottish Highlands? If you are dance artist and choreographer Julia McGhee, you wrap yourself in a huge gold space blanket, head out into the varied environments of Easter Ross, and invite the community to look closer.
Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals, Julia’s new choreographic research project, Goldy-looking blanket—or Goldy for short—explores a fascinating abstract alter ego. Stripped of a recognisable human form, Goldy moves between landscape, creature and object, acting as a cocoon, a safe space for metamorphosis, and a mirror for the audience’s subconscious mind.
For Julia, the project also carries personal weight.
In her mid-40s, she began to recognise her own neurodivergence, and that process, coupled with the perimenopause, has led her to question the boundaries of her identity and her body—an internal journey that has informed the development of Goldy.
The project operates across indoor and outdoor environments. In the wind-blown landscape of Easter Ross, collaborating dance artist Niamh O’Loughlin moves inside the gold material, allowing its physical shape to glide across fields, roll down hills, shape-shift in a bus shelter and even explore an abandoned telephone box. The movement interacts with a raw soundscape of wind, sheep, rain, builders, passing cars and local birdlife. From outside the material, Julia watches, directs and documents the process to inform her later choreography.
Indoors, the work becomes an immersive multimedia installation. Julia manipulates the space blanket from beneath, moving between silence, textured and intimate metallic rustling and slow increases in tempo, until Goldy swirls through the sound and space before dropping to the floor and then trying, slowly, somehow, to find a way out. The performance is accompanied by a pink-noise-inspired soundscape created by digital artist and filmmaker Lucas Chih-Peng Kao.
Together, Julia and Lucas determined that ‘the sound where Goldy lives’ is most closely related to pink noise, and Lucas has worked with that idea to create a soundscape around Goldy and the audience’s experience of her.
As Goldy leaves the room, the screen changes to video of silver and gold light: eerie, beautiful and strange. Light filmed through the Goldy material appears to leave an energetic imprint of her presence in the quiet space. Then it too fades, the music ends, and she is gone.
A conversation with the artist
During her week-long residency in her home village of Inver Julia sat down to discuss the vulnerability of abstract performance, the importance of artistic access for rural communities, and the pure joy of children leaping about beneath a ‘see-out-only’ golden blanket.
Interviewer: A lot of people find contemporary art intimidating, serious or confusing.
Julia: Yes, it can make people feel self-conscious because they think it’s something they should understand but maybe don’t—like it’s a test of whether they’re “in the know”.
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who feels like that?
Julia: I would say that even as an artist, I can sometimes feel that myself when I go and watch a performance like that. I find myself asking, “Do I get this? Does this mean something to me? Do I understand what it is?”
I think the artist always has their own message or what they’re trying to put across. But what I’m always thinking as well is, “What’s my interpretation of this?”
I don’t have to be told what to think. For me, that’s the beauty of art—and the beauty of very abstract art. It’s an offer. It’s an offer of, “Where does your mind want to go with this? Where are you at this moment in time, and where does this take you?” And that, I realise, is quite a difficult thing for lots of people to do because we don’t tend to practise it.
We don’t tend to practise it because a lot of what we consume in terms of art are things that have a narrative—things that tell us what they’re about, things that have a story or a message. So, we rarely practice the act of questioning, of opening our minds, of saying, “What does this mean to me?”
It requires allowing your mind to be a bit confused at first, perhaps. It means questioning, “What is this? What is happening here?” But then, it’s about just sitting with it—sitting with the questioning and allowing the experience to resonate with you.
The Geography of Inspiration
Interviewer: Let’s talk about your home, Inver. You seem to have a deep connection to Inver. Where does that come from?
Julia: So, part of it comes from living here for eighteen years, gradually building relationships, working with the primary school, and even watching the local kids grow up. It also feels incredibly safe and protected. It offers a life where you don’t have to worry about locking your doors or your car, there’s no through road, so you don’t have traffic zooming past, and you can just walk around freely.
And having built these local connections, I know there are people here I can always ask for help. Before moving up north, I lived in Edinburgh, and I never truly felt that sense of community. Even growing up just outside of Falkirk, I lived on a housing estate where we knew maybe a couple of next-door neighbours, but the area didn’t have a hall, a hub, or any real gathering point. The act of just wandering into a neighbour’s house for a cup of tea and a chat is something I have really only experienced here as an adult.
Interviewer: I’m curious why you chose to host an ambitious contemporary creative residency here? Why invite urban-based artists all the way up to this remote region?
Julia: I often have to travel elsewhere to find residency opportunities and support. But there’s something deeply important to me about both making work and sharing it right here. So when I manage to secure my own funding, I am determined to bring it back here. It matters to me, and there simply aren’t many people doing what we do in this region.
If you look at artists working in contemporary live performance or live art, you won’t find many who would put themselves in that bracket in Easter Ross. Even across the wider Highlands, we are quite widely spread—there is Robbie Synge in Nethy Bridge, Dana Macpherson on Skye, and Gail Sneddon over in Moray. We do exist, but we are all very far apart.
And of course, it is also uniquely beautiful here, and you can just go off and completely lose yourself in it. As an artist, that brings immense inspiration. I immerse myself in the environment—walking, wild swimming. The huge sky, the landscape, and the local sounds become part of my everyday experience. And when it comes time to create, that landscape has to come with me.
Audience Member: Even the bombing range!
Julia: Yes, even the bombing range! Even the presence of helicopters, jets, and the Army doing ground manoeuvres—it’s all part of the fabric of Inver, and my response to the environment is shaped by the reality of living with it every day. I really appreciate both Niamh and Lucas coming all this way to work with me in the place where I live. And thanks to the National Lottery and Creative Scotland for supporting my work, including a residency week here.
Valid Imagination
Interviewer: I understand that part of that funding allowed you to work with local primary school children. What did that process look like?
Julia: Yes, I wanted to try the piece out with a non-adult audience to find out what children make of a landscape shifting Goldy creature. I decided to show them about fifteen minutes of the work-in-progress, as a performance, and then give them some pieces of paper to write on or draw pictures. Together with their teachers they formed groups and chatted within their groups about what they saw, what they heard, what thoughts were going on, or any feelings that bubbled up for them. Doing it this way gave them processing time, and then we just had a little chat.
I was a bit apprehensive that some of them might find it scary, so I wanted to find that out. But I also think that children can see a lot of different things, and I felt that they would be intrigued. And having spoken to local parents of seven-to-ten-year-olds, and parents of teenagers, they’ve all said, “Yes, my kids would love this.”
Interviewer: If I play devil’s advocate for a moment, I’m a parent who thinks their child should be inside studying mathematics rather than “running around in a ridiculous gold blanket.” What do you say to them? Why does it matter?
Julia: Because art is important to everybody, and everybody should have access to it. Access to art—particularly in remote and rural places—is vital. It awakens the creative inside of us.
While access to traditional music or visual art like painting is great, there is a whole world out there of live contemporary performance and live art that a lot of people simply don’t get exposed to. Having the opportunity to encounter these different art forms and meet living artists is a way of looking differently at the world.
It’s critical for me that art and art-making are seen as just as important, and just as valid, as knowing how to fix plumbing, build a house, or work in a bank.
Interviewer: Why?
Julia: Because without art and without creativity, we don’t have imagination. We wouldn’t have a lot of the things that we enjoy as part of our lives, whether it’s reading books or watching films. It all has to come from somewhere, and it has to come from the imagination. That creativity needs to be fed.
If you don’t expose children to it, they don’t know they can do it. They don’t know it’s a possibility. It’s not apparent to them that this is a way of being, a way of living, and something they are allowed to have in their lives.
The Power of Play
Interviewer: After your performance you offered the children the chance to actually experience being under Goldy, and what was a fairly serious offering initially, turned into a shrieking, laughing Goldy sort of exploding all over the room. How do you respond to that as the creator?
Julia: Because Goldy is an alter-ego I perform as, the way I move is very slow and contained. The noise Goldy makes comes strictly from the material, not from my physical body. Through Goldy, I am reflecting those quiet aspects of my own self.
So, when I see Goldy taken over by people who live and express themselves in a completely different way—people who have an immediate, tactile response to the material—it is incredibly exciting. They have their own way of being Goldy. They find their own form of expression by experiencing what it feels like to be covered in this material, seeing how it moves in relation to their bodies. That physical experience brings out an emotional response that just bursts right out of them.
Interviewer: And that is very much the goal of doing a workshop with children?
Julia: Yes. But a similar thing happened when we workshopped it with young adult dancers during my Citymoves residency in Aberdeen. There was a lot of giggling, playfulness, and fun. It comes down to people’s response to the offer of being inside this material, and how they find their own way of being Goldy. It is essentially about play.
Interviewer: What was it like to watch the children just let themselves go like that?
Julia: It was wonderful. There is a real freedom in knowing you cannot be seen, yet you can see out. With the kids especially, they are trying to provoke a reaction from their audience—their peers, their teachers, and me. It is the joy of play, but the thrill of being watched while playing.
At the end of the workshop and performance, we had about 18 children from Inver Primary—all ages as it’s a rural village school—running around under the blanket. I was absolutely delighted and really surprised when some of them came back for the second performance. These days, you assume that once children see something, they move on. But they came back of their own accord—not brought by a parent or a teacher. They walked into a space very much set up for an adult audience, and they did that entirely off their own bat.
What that says to me is that there is an interest here we can build upon. It gives me hope for genuine audience engagement in the wider sense—making performance work that includes young people and creating collaborative community arts sessions.
Opening Windows in the Highlands
Interviewer: Was there a part of you that could relate to them? Like a young Julia seeing something unusual and inspiring for the first time?
Julia: Yes, absolutely. My mum took me to see a lot of contemporary dance when I was young. That certainly never happened in school; I don’t remember a single theatre production coming to my primary or high school. The only production we had was an annual school musical like Bugsy Malone or Oliver! In primary school, I remember doing The Jungle Book and playing Kaa the snake.
I realise now that I was incredibly privileged. I had a mother who practised contemporary dance in her youth, and she invested that interest and education in me.
Interviewer: Is that one of the reasons you continue to do this work today?
Julia: Yes, I think it is. I have never wanted to start a traditional dance school teaching weekly ballet, tap, or modern classes. It is fantastic that those are on offer in nearby Tain, but I am much more interested in connecting with people as an artist who makes work—offering forms of dance that simply aren’t common here.
Contemporary dance is rare in the Highlands. Live contemporary performance that crosses into the realm of live art is even less common. I connect with the primary school and offer these things to young people in Inver because I am essentially the only person doing this here.
I don’t feel like I am on a grand crusade to save the future of contemporary art; that isn’t a realistic aim. But I do something I love, something I find deeply interesting and challenging, and there aren’t many people doing it here. That makes it worth sharing, worth finding ways to connect.
Interviewer: Why do you look back on your mother opening that door as such a vital privilege?
Julia: Because not everyone gets that window of opportunity. If I hadn’t had that exposure as a child, I probably wouldn’t have sought out contemporary dance classes, continued dancing through university, or kept it as a central part of my adult life. Seeing professional performance work as a child is how you learn to dream about doing it yourself.
If that window hadn’t been opened, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I wouldn’t have an artistic practice, and I wouldn’t have chosen to be an artist. I would have missed out on incredible experiences performing, teaching, and travelling.
Dance is my life. The majority of people I know are fellow dance artists and choreographers. It has taken me a long time to realise it, but I am a recognised part of this beautiful artistic ecosystem in Scotland. Knowing I belong to that ecosystem is a large part of why I love what I do.
AUGUST, 2026
juliamcghee.co.uk
Julia McGhee is an artist based in the Scottish Highlands who works across choreography, performance, participatory practice and film. Her work centres on movement, the body, objects and materials that reflect the environment, history and the people she sees around her. She collaborates with other artists from interdisciplinary fields to create live indoor and outdoor performance, digital/multi-media projects and community engagement events.
Her current projects include The Morrich, Goldy-looking blanket and Buckethead. Each project investigates themes of self-discovery, metamorphosis, landscape, climate change and deep time.
Since moving to Easter Ross in 2011, Julia has initiated dance and movement projects for people of all ages and abilities within schools, community settings and arts organisations across the Highlands from Caithness to Lochaber and from the Black Isle to the Isle of Lewis. She has also worked with national organisations such as Starcatchers and Imaginate to facilitate movement and play sessions with early years and young people who have physical and learning disabilities.
She is a member of the Scottish Artists Union, The Work Room, the Dance Base Artist Advisory Group and the Dance North Regional Artist Support Scheme.
Creative Scotland is the public body that supports culture and creativity across all parts of Scotland, distributing funding provided by the Scottish Government and The National Lottery. Further information at creativescotland.com. Follow Creative Scotland on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Collaborating Artists on Goldy include:
Niahm O’Loughlin – niamholoughlindanceartist.com
Lucas Chi-Peng Kao – cplkao.myportfolio.com
Project Administration for Goldy:
Lauren Wilson