Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, signed A22 Gallery invitation showing an altered Sacred Heart image with a blue ink signature.

BREYER P-ORRIDGE | RE:CIRCULATION No. 009 | Found Prayer Card

Breyer P-Orridge, cream envelope front with two signatures and a circular blind stamp

The envelope is small, cream and unaddressed. No stamp, no postmark. Two signatures run along its lower edge: "J Breyer" in a grey, pencil-like line, and beside it, in black ink, the angular mark Genesis P-Orridge used for a name. In the upper corner, pressed into the paper rather than printed on it, is a blind stamp. LIMITED at the centre. PORRIDGE WITH EVERYTHING around the rim.

Inside are eight cards.

It came to us from the sale of The James Birch Collection at Sworders on 6 October 2026: roughly three hundred lots from four decades of a dealer's life, from early Grayson Perry ceramics to Francis Bacon's telegrams about Moscow. Among them was a group of Breyer P-Orridge material. Most of it is signed. Much of it is signed twice. This is the first of several notes on what that group is, and what kind of work it might be.

Eight prayers

Breyer P-Orridge, eight prayer card fronts arranged in a grid, each showing the altered Sacred Heart image

All eight cards carry the same image, printed in halftone. A Sacred Heart of the mass-produced devotional kind: halo, clouds, red robe. Set into it, a photographed chest with breasts, and in place of the heart, a red bulb trailing tubing.

Breyer P-Orridge, eight prayer card backs in a grid with different black printed texts on white

The backs are all different. Seven are headed Prayers for Pandrogeny & Breaking Sex. The eighth is a litany that runs from P-ANDROGENY through PERFECT, PRECIOUS and POTENT to CHOSEN ONE. Each card ends the same way: S/HE IS HER/E, © Breyer P-Orridge 2003.

Some read as prayers. Others read more like instructions:

CHANGE THE WAY TO PERCEIVE AND CHANGE ALL MEMORY.

Two names

The cards are credited to Breyer P-Orridge, the shared name Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge used for the Pandrogyne project. The envelope that holds them is signed twice, in two inks.

This isn't one artist's work with the other's blessing. Collaboration is in how the cards are credited and how the envelope is signed.

Objects

Genesis P-Orridge, Painful But Fabulous invitation reverse with A22 Gallery dates and Breyer P-Orridge artwork credit

The image on the cards has a title. The invitation to Painful But Fabulous (The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge), the exhibition James Birch staged at A22 in Clerkenwell (private view 1 June 2003, open until 27 June), credits it at the foot of the card:

BREYER P-ORRIDGE (Lady J. Breyer P-Orridge and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge), Transgendered Sacred Heart (sketch), 2003. Polaroid Photograph/Found Prayer Card.

Breyer P-Orridge, A22 invitation front showing the altered Sacred Heart image with a blue ink signature at right
Breyer P-Orridge, detail of the blue ink signature across the invitation image beside the yellow halo

So the work began as somebody else's prayer card, found, with a Polaroid set into it. On the cards in the envelope, it is a prayer card again.

The invitation's subtitle promises "expanded polaroids and objects 1973–2003". Whether these cards were among the objects on show, handed out at the private view, or made alongside the exhibition and kept apart from it, nothing on them says. Birch remembered the gallery being full every day. In what he wrote about it, he didn't say what was on the walls. That question is where this series starts.

FLUXSHOE

There is an older history close by. In 1972 and 1973, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti were among more than a hundred artists in FLUXSHOE, a touring Fluxus exhibition that opened in Falmouth and travelled to seven British venues. The Hungarian artist Endre Tót is on the same list. His name turns up again, beside Genesis's, on a rubber stamp in one of the books from the same Birch group. That book will get its own entry.

Fluxus made editions out of everyday printed matter. George Brecht's Water Yam (1963), one of the earliest Fluxus editions, was a box of loose event scores: short instructions printed on cards. Copies vary in how many cards they hold. A card that tells its reader to change the way to perceive sits close to an event score. An envelope embossed LIMITED, around a joke about porridge, sits close to an edition.

Nothing here says Breyer P-Orridge were quoting Fluxus in 2003. What the record shows is that Genesis was there when Fluxus toured Britain. Read alongside that, the card, the rubber stamp, the small edition and the joke look less like borrowed style than like habits kept for thirty years.

Four months

Genesis and Lady Jaye's matching breast implants are widely dated to Valentine's Day 2003. The private view was on 1 June. If the Polaroid records that surgery (the timing points that way, though the photograph carries no date), the image went from the operating room to an invitation in under four months, and onto prayer cards within the year. The cards are not a later commemoration of the Pandrogyne project. They were printed while it was happening.

Return

Breyer P-Orridge, cream envelope reverse with triangular flap and circular embossing at left

The cards don't tell us whether they were shown. They do tell us how they were meant to travel: by hand, in an envelope, as prayers, in a limited number nobody wrote down. The envelope keeps both names, from a time when there were still two people to sign. Lady Jaye died in October 2007.

There is more in the group. Part 2 is the candles: devotional candles in glass, burned and signed, their stickers pressed on by hand. After that, the books, each with an entry of its own.

From the James Birch Collection, Part 1.
Provenance: The James Birch Collection, Sworders, 6 October 2026, lot 217.

In the shop: Prayers for Pandrogeny & Breaking Sex, 2003 · Painful But Fabulous, A22 Gallery, 2003

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