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There is something unusually gentle at the centre of Pleasure Imprints.
A person chooses a flower. They approach the artist. Guided by written, illustrated or audio instructions, they carefully press it into wet clay built across Kitt’s face and head.
The gesture is small. Intimate, but not intrusive. Collaborative, but entirely optional.
Over the duration of the performance, one impression will gather beside another. Flowers will become embedded in clay; individual acts of participation will accumulate into a changing sculpture - a temporary map of touch, trust and collective care.
Kitt calls it “a messy map of autonomy, agency and delight”. But beneath the tenderness of this work lies a harder necessity.
Kitt, a Disabled trans sculptor based in North East England, is launching a two-month crowdfunding campaign to raise £12,000 for gender-affirming healthcare. The campaign says the current regional NHS wait is six years and ten months.
Rather than wait indefinitely, Kitt is attempting to pay privately - and has transformed the deeply personal, financially precarious reality of doing so into a public artwork.
That definitely doesn't make the situation less serious. But it does, however, prevent the system from having the final say about what kind of story this must become.
“My overwhelming experience of being trans is dead joyful,” Kitt says.
“This work reflects that. It is feral resistance to the practical and political challenges of transition - particularly at a time of increased discrimination and restrictive legislation faced by trans, queer and Disabled people.”
It's a significant statement because stories about trans lives are so frequently framed by other people: as controversy, policy, pathology, threat or abstract argument.
Here, Kitt retains authorship.
Pleasure Imprints doesn't deny the frustration, cost or physical consequences of delayed healthcare. Nor does it permit those things to define the totality of a life.
Instead, Kitt talks about enchantment. Pleasure. Mischief. Mess. The right both to celebrate their body as it exists today and to seek the care needed to change it.
That coexistence is essential. A person doesn't have to despise their present self in order to exercise autonomy over their future body. Joy doesn't cancel need. Celebration doesn't remove injustice. Indeed, joy can become one means of refusing to be consumed by it.
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The performance takes place on 4 July.
Kitt will sit at a desk surrounded by velvet, chintz, flowers and natural materials, wearing a lace football top and boxing shorts specially created by British fashion designer Adam Jones.
Across their face and head, they will gradually construct mounds and swirls of wet clay. Visitors will then be invited to select fresh flowers and press them gently into its surface.
Kitt will not speak during the performance. Clear instructions and staff support will enable people to decide whether and how they wish to participate.
The work is designed with access in mind. Materials are scent-free and hypoallergenic, instructions are available in written, illustrated and audio forms, and information about local trans support organisations will be present.
There is care embedded not only within the concept, then, but within the practical structure of the event.
The installation takes inspiration from Kitt’s grandmother’s 1980s council house and garden, remembered as a place of unexpected acceptance during a semi-nomadic childhood.
Vintage fabrics and familiar domestic textures reconstruct something of that sanctuary. Against them, the performance becomes both artwork and refuge: a space where transformation is approached not through clinical detachment, but through colour, material, memory and touch.
Kitt uses the phrase “clarting on” to describe the process - a piece of North East Pitmatic meaning to mess on or mess about. It 's an entirely appropriate phrase for an artistic practice Kitt calls Mess Making as Social Glue.
Their work asks what art can actually do: whether it can create solace, connection, solutions and mischief; whether people making something together might also become, however briefly, responsible for one another.
In Pleasure Imprints, that question's not metaphorical.
The audience doesn't simply view the work. Its members help construct it. Every flower leaves evidence that somebody approached with care.
The crowdfunder’s £12,000 target isn't an approximate or symbolic figure.
According to the campaign budget, £10,000 is required for surgery. A further £1,000 will cover travel and accommodation because treatment will take place outside the North East. Another £800 represents two weeks away from Kitt’s self-employed work - without holiday pay, sick pay or an employer-funded safety net. These details expose the less visible architecture surrounding private healthcare.
The cost isn't only the procedure. It's the train journey, the hotel, the recovery period, the work that can't be undertaken and the income that consequently disappears.
For somebody who has worked full-time as a self-employed artist for seven years, time away from work must itself be funded. This is how a waiting list enters daily life.
It becomes a spreadsheet. A savings calculation. A campaign deadline. A question of which objects might be sold, what labour can be offered and whether enough strangers can be persuaded to help.
Crowdfunding is often spoken about as if it represents the spontaneous generosity of the internet. Frequently, it does. People contribute because they care, because they recognise a need or because a story reaches them at the right moment.
But it is worth asking why access to healthcare should depend upon someone’s ability to construct a successful public appeal.
Crowdfunding rewards visibility, confidence, networks, digital fluency and the ability to package personal need into a compelling narrative. Those without such resources might face the same urgency while attracting none of the attention.
Kitt is an established artist whose work has been commissioned and exhibited by organisations in Britain and internationally. Recent projects have involved the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, QUEERCIRCLE, Craftspace, Arts&Heritage and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Their work has also been shown at Atlanta Contemporary and Saatchi Gallery.
That professional record gives Kitt the artistic language and community through which to build this campaign. It doesn't make the need to do so any less troubling.
It would be easy to treat Pleasure Imprints only as an inventive fundraising mechanism.
Buy a print. Book a mentoring session. Enter the art tombola. Help an artist reach a financial target.
Those opportunities form an important part of the campaign. Photographs by queer portrait and performance photographer Christa Holka will be offered as limited-edition prints, alongside mentoring sessions, framed works and an art tombola featuring contributions from collaborating artists. Objects and prints will also be available at selected locations, including BALTIC during July.
But the work deserves to be considered as more than an appeal with unusually sophisticated imagery.
It asks who is permitted authority over a body.
It asks how care can be practised when institutions are absent, delayed or inaccessible.
It asks what happens when private necessity becomes public performance - and whether visibility can be reclaimed as agency rather than exposure.
Photography is important to that process.
Christa Holka’s documentation preserves a work that would otherwise exist only temporarily: clay moved by human contact; flowers bruising and changing; Kitt’s face progressively obscured and remade.
The resulting images hold an interesting tension. They reveal the artist while physically covering them. They record vulnerability, but also control. Kitt isn't a passive subject being altered by an audience; the terms of participation have been created by the artist.
Consent is built into the work. That's a fundamental - both artistically and politically.
There can be a tendency, particularly when discussing marginalised communities, to imagine seriousness and joy as opposites.
A work concerned with healthcare inequality must be sombre to be legitimate. Resistance has to look angry. Political art must explain its politics in language already familiar to institutions.
Kitt resists that expectation.
“Pleasure Imprints is about trans enchantment,” they say. “It’s about celebrating my body as it is now while fighting for the right to transform it. It’s about joy as resistance.”
This joy isn't decorative optimism layered over a difficult reality. It's part of the argument.
To insist upon pleasure amid administrative delay and political hostility is to reject the idea that trans and Disabled people should appear publicly only as objects of pity, anxiety or debate.
To make a refuge from chintz, clay and garden flowers is to say that tenderness has political weight.
To invite others into that refuge is to transform spectators into participants - not in Kitt’s identity or healthcare decisions, which remain entirely their own, but in a shared act of recognition.
The flower is not treatment. The artwork can't repair a healthcare system. A crowdfunding campaign shouldn't be mistaken for structural change.
But the work makes something otherwise hidden tangible. It shows the labour required to secure care. It reveals the financial details normally kept private. It demonstrates that autonomy is rarely exercised in isolation: it depends on money, time, information, accessibility, transport, recovery and human support.
And it also offers a different image of transition. Not a sterile before and after. Not a debate conducted over somebody’s head.
A face covered in clay. Flowers placed carefully by many hands. A body celebrated in the present while moving deliberately towards its future.
That's more than a fundraising device. It's an imprint of the care that should already have been there.
Pleasure Imprints
Kitt’s crowdfunding campaign runs from 1 July to 31 August 2026, with a target of £12,000.
The participatory performance takes place on 4 July 2026.
Supporters can contribute through donations, limited-edition photographic prints by Christa Holka, creative mentoring sessions, original work and an art tombola.
Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/pleasure-imprints-1
Artist: Kitt, also known as Lady Kitt
Instagram: @lady.kitt1
Photography: Christa Holka
Header image: Lady Kitt by @christaholkastudio
