This month the Love Arts festival, which encourages and celebrates creativity, opened across Leeds. My contribution to the event was part of the ‘This is Me’ exhibition at the beautiful Central Library. This is a multi-media show in which participants create a single piece to convey some sense of how they experience the world.

My work was called ‘Always an Alien’. A green tinted photo of an electricity pylon, with the title incorporated as white text and mounted on black card, this piece reflects my experience both as someone who has suffered depersonalization and as an asexual. It also conveys my love of the abstract, ambigious and artificial, all qaulities I find inherent in these steel giants. In many ways I find them easier to relate to than people. My world has always felt more Mondrian than Carravagio.

It was wonderful to be able to contribute to the Love Arts festival and to see my work as part of a diverse and very interesting show.

Damian Mark Whittle