Marc Provins

One of the advantages of taking the train to work is extra reading time, and by extension extra thinking time. I'm ploughing through books at the moment and my world is expanding thanks to my new role working with fashion students. Last week I was reading Worn Stories by Emily Spivack, a series of one page personal accounts of emotional connections to items of clothing. The book has made me laugh out loud at some stories and it has shocked and moved me. The Marina Abromović anecdote ended with the words 'everybody is vulnerable'. This seemed so poignant to me, strangely reassuring that we are all the same and equally exposed to our own emotional ebbs and flows as well as the external forces of the world around us. I've carried the sentence around in my head for days and these images are a response, a visual message back to Marina  Abromović. 

I’m new to commuting and it’s been quite an eyeopener getting the tram to Manchester Victoria each morning and then a train to Liverpool. The trams are full to capacity and I’ve never got a seat. I overheard someone saying he sometimes goes three stops in the wrong direction to the end of the line so that he can stay on and get a seat. The whole experience is very intimate; you can actually feel other people’s phones buzzing as you are squeezed in together. Yesterday I started to count how many people were in contact with me, I got to five and then a man moved his hand that I realised had been on my stomach, so six. I’ve been amazed how people just get used to this and continue as normal making private phone calls, playing games on their phones, attempting to read, applying makeup, eating, drinking, coughing, sneezing, belching and releasing toxic gasses, completely unselfconsciously. City life...