Marc Provins

Today is the last day for Hull to be UK City of Culture, but only just the beginning of the reinvention of the city. I've visited twice during the year (and once a few years ago) and have been amazed at the zeal with which the city has embraced the opportunity to use this as a catalyst for change. Just like Manchester did after the IRA bomb and Liverpool did with European Capital of Culture, Hull will continue to use this momentum to bring confidence and life back to it's streets. This is the third piece in a side project where I'm able to explore my dual  preoccupations of the natural world and the built environment. I'm interested in the edge of the city, where human control fades and nature starts reasserting itself. The periphery often reveals something of the lost history of a place, especially in our post-industrial northern towns; crumbling architecture on an epic scale and underused waterways that were once the main routes for trade. I feel like a det

I had a curious thought recently; you might call it a moment of clarity, and something that makes me read my memories slightly differently. Growing, gardening, tending the land for me is a form of therapy that helps me look after my mental health. It struck me that as I come from a family of gardeners, my clan have probably also been self-medicating, using growing and nurturing as a way of maintaining equilibrium. As a child I thought they were growing crops or making the garden look pleasing, which they were, but all the time they may have also been doing what they needed to do to tame the chattering monkeys.

I've been meaning to photograph these delicate Japanese anemone for weeks, but life got busy and they shed their petals. They've reached nearly a metre tall in my front garden, putting on a display for months. Today they looked otherworldly in the surprise October sunshine and I couldn't resist them. They are quite contrary; named Japanese but actually Chinese, both medicinal and poisonous. Anemone can apparently be used to calm you during panic attacks but today my eyes were itching all afternoon after handling them. A botanical double edged sword.

This is the second in a new series of pictures made on the periphery of towns and cities. I made this one on my recent visit to Arles in southern France. A s always  I'm interested in the relationship between the natural and manmade worlds and the tussle for supremacy. My first attempt was made on the threshold between Manchester and Salford, and can be viewed here:  Periphery Spending time in the baking heat of Arles really made me think about the lush nature of the British Isles. We often complain about the unpredictable nature of our weather but it does mean we are surrounded by hundreds of shades of green for much of the time, even our urban centres have an emerald glow in spring and summer. The grass is always greener.

As the twists and turns of world events get evermore bewildering and alarming I retreat to the beauty and rhythm of nature. These eryngiums weren't grown by me but a gift from friends. I've watched as they've changed over the weeks, until the moment I photographed them in the daylight streaming through my studio windows.

Delicate strength. 

Some things are shared by everyone on Earth.  30 words for shade: hije gerizpe адценне hlad сянка ombra hlad odstín nuance schaduw vari sävy ombre sombra schatten skugga scáth nokrāsa atspalvis ладовина dell nyanse cień umbră оттенок odtieň senca nyans відтінок cysgod שאָטן

This acanthus is growing in my front garden. I like that I inherited it from the previous owner of my home, or maybe the one before that. Several neighbours told me in my first spring here what to expect; huge spectacular flower spikes that last for weeks and weeks. I'm amazed it's so happy in soggy Manchester as it is native to the Mediterranean and North Africa. The leaves are thought by historians to have been the inspiration for the decoration of Greco-Roman architecture and are apparently embroidered into clothing worn by Helen of Troy. Truly woven into our human culture.  Like all plants this acanthus is reaching for the sun, a star 150 million kilometres away from our home. Without the sun, there would be no life on Earth. Nurturing and growing is an everyday activity whilst simultaneously being an act of immense poignancy. I like this curious meeting of the domestic and the massive. We juggle the two every day, going through the motions, keeping thi

These pictures were made using the natural light coming into my improvised studio, late in the evening just after the summer solstice. The leaves are from the gunnera in my front garden, which unconventionally I keep in a pot to restrict his size. They are native to Madagascar but he seems to quite like the moist Manchester air. Handling this precious creature is like reaching back to the Jurassic period, it looks like dinosaur salad and is believed to have been around for 150 millions years.  My English suburban front garden is a time machine.

Making a home comes from the the core of me, I've always done it, I’m absorbed by the domestic. This is the place that I'm lucky enough to have that feels safe and secure. I like to arrange things, to take time to think about what I have around me, what goes together, influenced by colour, shape, history, meaning and memory. I also like to nurture, to grow things, its part of my make up, my nature you might say. The seed heads here are from my allotment, they look like this as a result of the weather this year. The light is natural, streaming in through my windows on a hot June morning. This room like my back garden faces southeast and has beautiful light and shadows from sunrise until the late afternoon. I'm telling you all of this because today I wanted to think about simple, everyday things, to meditate on the bigger picture, the sublime in the classical sense. Like many people I'm sure, I've started to feel overwhelmed by an unpredictable sequence of incom

I've always found the periphery of the city an interesting space to explore. It can feel like a secret concrete garden, forgotten and ignored. In the case of Manchester and Salford who sit on either side of a watery border the urban outer limits are fast expanding and blurring. Land that was forgotten for decades is suddenly valuable and being developed at an unprecedented speed. The relationship between nature and the built environment is quite curious in these neighbourhoods; sometimes roughly tamed, occasionally manicured but more likely wildly free, attempting it's own accelerated land grab. 

Jugaad - a colloquial Hindi and Punjabi word, which roughly translates as an innovative fix or a simple work-around, a solution that bends the rules. It is also often used to signify creativity; to make existing things work, or to create new things with meagre resources.

It's been raining all day and these beauties aren't built to survive in such a downpour. So I retrieved and photographed them before they become compost. There's something poetic about such an amazing, shouty display that is so short-lived.  I did something similar last year: Falling Apart in the Rain

Although I love growing and colour I wouldn't have chosen roses for my garden. I inherited these from the last owner of my home, and despite some tentative pruning and tying in they've been pretty much neglected. At the moment I have two high fences completely covered in them, literally hundreds, I feel like I should invite people around to see them, its a rather ridiculous, spectacular sight I feel I need to share. Whilst collecting these I got several injuries, which reminded me of their dual nature; all pretty and delicate on top whilst below they snag and catch with their razor like thorns. 

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...