Dafydda

An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

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An Interview with Dafydda ap Gruffydd:“The Art of Going Slowly”

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.

Art in Motion: Dafydda ap Gruffydd’s Parkour as Fine Art

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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…

Nesting (Sticks on a cup)

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A wonderful memory-piece from Dafydda, who created this blistering work over a period of seven weeks in a park in Outer Dundee.
“With this piece I was trying to draw attention, through carefully placed sticks, to the complex nature of life itself. Each stick represents both the unknown in the future and, at the same time, the continuing elapsation of time that bears down on us all.”

Art critic Hoffa Welogi says: “When I first saw this work I thought, that’s it, that is the end of art. All that can be achieved has been achieved. There is nothing more to be said. The cup, lonely, empty – or full, we cannot tell – being used not for anything so everyday as drinking, but as architecture, as an example of how humans can build in a sustainable way. But it also shouts of its position in the avant garde, for is this not actually a new form of portraiture? Soon any collector who doesn’t have a Daffyda in their collection will become reclusive, unable to face their peers. Daffyda, you have made a masterpiece.”