Casey Jenkins’ Australia Council funding for Immaculate revoked over legal concerns
A controversial Melbourne performance artist was given funding through a government body for a project which involved her filming herself inseminating donor sperm. But the funding has since been pulled - here’s why.
Victoria
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A Melbourne artist who is livestreaming her attempts to get pregnant by self-insemination has lost federal government backing because of “potential legal risks”.
Controversial performance artist Casey Jenkins was originally given funding through the government’s Australia Council for the Arts for her project titled Immaculate, which involves the 41-year-old filming herself inseminating donor sperm.
Jenkins’ project started in August but the Australia Council for the Arts announced this week it had withdrawn their funding.
The council said the grant was meant for career development in the international market but in the wake of the coronavirus travel-ban Jenkins was able to revise her project.
According to the council, once its legal team cast an eye over the details of the Immaculate project it deemed it too risky.
“Legal advice identified the possibility that a legal claim could be brought in the future and the council determined this was not an acceptable risk for a corporate Commonwealth entity,” the council said in a statement.
“Our decision not to support Immaculate is informed by the potential legal risk it presents. It is not a statement on the project itself.”
The council said there had been no government instruction to scrap the funding and its decision was not swayed by media coverage or public criticism.
Jenkins described the decision to pull the funding as “shocking”.
She wrote on her Facebook page: “It is incredibly intimidating to have a government entity as powerful as Australia Council imply that I have done or may do something illegal and that I have been misleading in the production of my work”.
In her initial promotion of her project, Jenkins billed it as a way for people “to witness a moment of creation”.
She wrote that the monthly live self-inseminations would “elevate the experience of queer reproduction and disrupt heteronormative parenting narratives”.
The project is not the first time Jenkins has courted controversy.
In 2013, she gained international headlines for her work titled ‘Casting off my womb’ where she knitted from a ball of wool inserted in her vagina.
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