JMS is a curator, artist and creative producer. At the heart of these entangled practices is an understanding of performance art as a potent, contemporary modality of ritual. He / they draws on queer, ecological and esoteric thought to engage with the lost, the unseen, the forgotten. He understands his performances and films as thin places, as ceremony, as a way of practicing sensitivity, of reorienting attention and touching the more raw edges of experience.
As a curator, they activate spaces for collective encounter through Future Ritual, cultivating intergenerational exchange and artist-led research, experimentation and creation. Future Ritual is a long term curatorial, research and organising practice initiated in 2017.
Since 2024, Joseph has worked as Curator, Public Practice at Tate. Previous roles have included those at Live Art Development Agency, The Place and ]performance s p a c e[. JMS is also co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio.
Across all this work, Joseph remains committed to the live and embodied practices which welcome complexity, senstivity, tension and difficulty, and which call towards the more raw edges of experience.
Joseph lives in London (UK) but most often works in dialogue with the wet, windy Pennine moors and Cumbrian fells of the English North West.
joseph@futureritual.co.uk
Instagram // Mailing ListFuture Ritual, A Felling, Venice International Performance Art Week, 2024. Photo by Lorenza Cini.
A Felling
Produced by Future Ritual. Commissioned by IKLECTIK. Presented by IKLECTIK (2023), Chapter Arts Centre and Venice International Performance Art Week (2024).
A collective performance initiated by Joseph Morgan Schofield and co-created with Ash McNaughton and Marcel Sparmann. A Felling invites audiences to step into a space of contemporary ritual, activated through intense embodied practices and characterised by expressions of compassion, vulnerability, strength and ethical exchange. Through this future ritual, we temporarily inhabit time in a different way, engaging in individual and collective experiences of processing and communion.
> Future Ritual: A Felling
A week after my Dad died, I made a ritual performance with artists Ash McNaughton and Marcel Sparmann.
We split a table apart and broke plates. Ash made a wing from hot wax across their back. Marcel spoke apologies across time and space. I shaved wood from a timber plank with my Dad’s block plane, holding the shavings in my arms until they fell or flew. Ash’s voice called out through the room and I placed great weights upon their chest. Marcel and I danced, blindfolded with table limbs tied to his arms. I pierced my forehead and bled, bled, bled upon the timber. We became a chours, submerging our heads in buckets filled with water until we ran out of air, polyphonic gasps bursting from the deep.
Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Future Ritual, A Felling, IKLECTIK, 2023. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
practices: curation / film / performance / writing
contexts: Future Ritual / Tate / VSSL studio / ]ps[
years: 2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 /