Concrete Botany

Concrete Botany

Concrete Botany is a temporary mural about Aberdeen’s urban flora. It celebrates the small, often missed green spaces that can be found in most neighbourhoods in Aberdeen: the weeds growing in our gardens and in between the stones of the sidewalks. The work was inspired by the artist’s own experiences of the coronavirus lockdowns, and their need for more green spaces in Aberdeen’s city centre in a time when we were unable to leave the city to enjoy nature in the Shire or the rest of the country.  

Historically a city based around the oil and gas industries, Aberdeen’s need for a green pandemic recovery is high. Concrete Botany imagines a sustainable future city in which the nature/city binary is broken down, and in which we find a way to rebuild cities as more in harmony with local nature. The artist dreams of a future in which urban foraging and farming help cities become partly self-sufficient, and in which we let go of our need for control and allow nature to grow freely around us. The main plant that inspired the artwork is common sorrel, a plant that grows abundantly in Aberdeen, and is part of the beautiful outdoors the Northeast has to offer.  

The mural was created using woodcut techniques, with largely using nontoxic inks. Alongside the artwork, Parel is organising a Wild Printmaking workshop using local plants.  

Alongside the artwork, you can join Parel in a free Cyanotype (camera-less photography) workshop at Peacock Studios, booking required.

Parel Joy is an artist, printmaker and writer. Their work often centres around themes of feeling at home: on this planet, in a house or a country, with a person, in a body. Memory, sense of belonging and otherness are often part of these explorations. Parel combines different printmaking techniques, media and languages, and loves the medium of print for its tangibility and focus, as an escape from fast-paced content and media.   

Parel’s work was previously published in Blacklist Journal, Hysteria Zine and The Gaudie, and their zine I Dreamt I Was Kissing a Stranger is currently for sale at Good Press, Glasgow. Their work was recently on show in De Wintertuin, Antwerp, as part of the Anonymous Printmakers’ Unseen World exhibition. Parel lived in Aberdeen until 2021, before relocating to Belgium, where they now study and work. Their debut poetry pamphlet The Queen of Cups and Other Poems is due to be published with SPAM Publishers this summer. Concrete Botany is their first artwork of this scale.