Cardiff Contemporary Arts Festival 2014

October 2014 saw the launch of Cardiff’s largest visual arts event in the shape of Cardiff Contemporary. I was one of four artists working ‘live’ as part of the festival, exploring underground the city, looking for tunnels, basements, crypts, Vaults and secret passages. I spent six weeks researching and investigating as many underground spaces as I could gain access to, using Facebook and Twitter to tell people what I was up to and also to receive stories back from the public about underground places they had been in.

As well as the expected cellars and service tunnels there were a great many stories and myths that were as interesting as anything I found. I did however re-discover a medieval stone tunnel in the heart of the city and gain access to a beautiful old iron mine on the City boundary. Perhaps the most intriguing of all was the thwarted attempts to access a major telecoms tunnel system underneath the city that is covered by the Official Secrets Act.