When I meet Dafydda ap Gruffydd, she’s already halfway across the café.
Not in the usual sense. She is literally halfway: mid-step, paused with quiet concentration, as if the act of crossing the floor were a kind of ritual, which for her it is. Her progress is almost imperceptible—glacial, reverent. We do not speak until she has reached the table. It takes nine minutes.
This, I quickly learn, is typical of Dafydda.
Born on the remote Welsh island of Skomer, Dafydda ap Gruffydd is a land artist, endurance walker, and—more recently—a practitioner of what she terms “contemplative parkour.” Her practice defies categorisation. With a reputation for impermanence and a philosophy shaped as much by folklore as by Fluxus, Dafydda is one of the few artists whose greatest work may well be her own movement through the world.
Her flip-flops from her twin circumnavigations of the globe are now under glass in her local museum in Byllwngwest. But Dafydda herself remains defiantly uncontainable. Her book, How to Walk Across Your Living Room by Someone Who Has Walked Across Their Living Room, has already become a minor cult object in collector circles.
Peri: You once described walking as your primary material. What does that mean in practice?
Dafydda ap Gruffydd:
Most materials are held or shaped—clay, metal, even paint. I suppose my material holds me. I walk not to get anywhere, but to embed myself in the act of moving. Each step is a mark. Each pause is an erasure. I’m trying to walk so lightly that I un-walk the space behind me.
Peri: You’re known for your slowness. Your walk from Land’s End to Bristol took several months, at a precise 1.3 miles per hour. Why that pace?
Dafydda:
Because that’s how fast the heart of the land beats. Any faster, and you miss it. I chose 1.3 mph after calibrating my breath with the flight path of a red kite I saw circling above Gwent. It’s not science, but it’s not not science either.
Peri: Your work resists documentation. You don’t photograph your installations. You rarely title your performances. Is this a reaction to the art market?
Dafydda:
Not really. I just think the land remembers things better than we do. Why compete with that? I leave sculptures made of ice, wool, sometimes soil. By the time someone arrives, they’re gone. I don’t call it loss. I call it completion.
Peri: You’ve recently incorporated parkour into your practice, but in a very… Dafydda way. Can you tell us about that?
Dafydda (smiling):
Parkour is usually about efficiency—how to get from A to B using the body’s full potential. I’ve inverted that. I use parkour to get from A to A, slowly, with great care. I once spent three hours gently rolling over a low stone wall in mid Wales. I called it Unnecessary Passage #4. Though, of course, I didn’t write that down.
Peri: You often invoke the Welsh word qwest, which has no English equivalent. Could you expand on that for our readers?
Dafydda:
Qwest is the kind of journey you only begin when the reason for going has already started to dissolve. It’s usually over ten miles. But the distance is less important than the feeling: that you’re walking toward something you’ll never quite find. Most of my work tries to live in that feeling.
Peri: What do you hope people take away from your work—if there’s nothing to take away?
Dafydda:
A sensation, maybe. A new attention to the ground under their feet. The desire to walk out of their front door without a destination. Or just the confidence to cross their living room with ceremony, noticing every step. That’s enough. That’s everything.
Peri: And what’s next?
Dafydda (pauses):
I’ve begun preparing for a new piece: walking backwards from Bristol to the edge of my kitchen. It will likely take the rest of the year. I’ll leave no trace. Hopefully not even a memory.
As we leave the café, I notice Dafydda spending several minutes examining a single paving stone. She crouches, brushes some grit away with her sleeve, then slowly hoists herself onto a low wall—not to leap from it, but to sit. Still. Present.
In a world built on speed, Dafydda ap Gruffydd reminds us that walking can be an act of resistance. Or reverence. Or simply a beautifully obscure reason to keep going.
Signed Collectors’ copies of Dafydda’s book including appendices on long-distance flip flops and living on the road are available from Dafydda via post.
