There are few artists alive today who make motion itself the medium. Fewer still approach that motion with the grace, precision, and brilliance of Dafydda ap Gruffydd. Known for her enigmatic land art and long-distance walking projects, Dafydda has recently turned her quiet, relentless attention to an unlikely new canvas: parkour.
Parkour, often associated with urban rebellion and kinetic bravado, is reborn in Dafydda’s work as a form of contemplative sculpture—a choreography of refusal and respect. “I don’t leap,” she says in her typically understated tone, “I negotiate.” For Dafydda, vaulting a handrail is not about athleticism but about communion—with gravity, with architecture, with the land.
Her performances are fleeting. She will arrive in a location unannounced: a crumbling brick underpass in Swansea, a derelict footbridge outside Aberystwyth, or most recently, a half-forgotten cattle path in the Brecon Beacons. There, with almost monastic reverence, she executes what she calls “slow-parkour”—a hybrid of land art, movement study, and Welsh metaphysics. Each gesture is purposeful, but not necessarily dramatic; each landing is softened, nearly silent. There are few audiences. No cameras. Only the land watching back.
“I’m trying to bring qwest into physical form,” she explains, referencing the untranslatable Welsh term that recurs in all her statements. “Parkour becomes a kind of vertical walking. Not just across space, but up it—over it. Through it. For no reason, and yet absolutely necessarily.”
Indeed, Dafydda’s entire practice orbits around this concept of the obscure pilgrimage. Her previous project, Walking at Exactly 1.3 mph from Land’s End to Bristol, was cut short due to family responsibilities, but not before gaining her quiet renown among the walking-arts community. Her twin circumnavigations of the globe—performed in a pair of now-enshrined flip-flops—cemented her as a practitioner of extreme durational absurdism, equal parts sincerity and satire.
Now, in her parkour work, that tension has become elastic. There is comedy in watching a woman clamber slowly over a stile she could have easily bypassed. There is pathos in the way she flattens her body against a disused climbing wall, not to scale it, but to feel its temperature. “I’m not conquering anything,” she insists. “I’m listening.”
Her new book, How to Walk across your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked across their Living Room, due for release this summer, furthers this ethos. The title masks a text that is quietly radical—a kind of anti-manifesto in which domestic terrain becomes the site of spiritual awakening. She refers to hallways as “corridors of becoming” and insists that we “make steps with full attention.” One footnote simply reads: “Have you tried rolling under your coffee table today?”
For Dafydda, parkour is less an act of defiance than of reverence. It is a method of acknowledging the vertical dimensions of human presence—climbing a wall not to escape, but to inhabit. She sees no contradiction between the wildness of her rural upbringing on Skomer Island and the concrete clutter of a cityscape. Both are landscapes. Both are temporary. And both, if stepped on just so, might whisper back.
As land artists increasingly grapple with questions of permanence, footprint, and environmental ethics, Dafydda ap Gruffydd offers a new proposition: that the most profound gesture might be the one that leaves no trace, not even a heel print in the dust. Her parkour is not showy, is hardly documented. It’s not about reaching the other side of the rail. It’s about the obscure reasons you decided to climb it in the first place. That, she reminds us, is the heart of qwest.
Collectors interested in Dafydda’s upcoming non-announced parkour interventions are encouraged to look out of their windows hopefully at precisely the right time.You never know…
