Running Out of Roath 2019

In 2019 I was invited to spend a month as artist in residence with Made in Roath, an artist run space in a former shop at the heart of Cardiff’s Roath district. I chose to make a project about running as a way of escaping the city using Made in Roath as my starting point. From the building’s location I could see the hills of the ridgeway to the north and I decided to run there, taking as straight a route as possible, passing through parts of the city and its suburbs that I was unfamiliar with, in a quest to pass beyond the urban boundary. My run took me to an elevated rural vantage point where I had a great view of the city and the Severn Estuary beyond.

Following this experience, I decided to run as close as I could to the four compass points to see where each ‘escape route’ would take me, documenting each journey on video. Each run was about 5 miles and landed me in four very different places, north onto the ridgeway hill above Cardiff, south to the beach at Penarth on the Bristol Channel, east along the seawall at Wentloog on the Severn Estuary and west to an Elizabethan manor in the village of St Fagans. The four films and maps became part of an installation about the project at the end of the residency and a talk about the ideas behind the project. The final aspect of the project was being able to use my senior person’s bus pass to get a free ride back from where my run ended.