Joseph Morgan Schofield


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
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performance


Joseph makes queer ritual action in which the sweating sensate body is positioned at the heart of the practice. His work often involves practices of channeling, divination, exhaustion and the crossing of thresholds. Joseph draws upon an expansive material, physical and poetic vocabulary he has developed across the last decade in dialogue with a host of agents and collaborators, human and otherwise. While they live in London (UK), the wet, windy moorland and wild fells of the North West remain key influences and collaborators. Responsive to site, memory and weather, there is brutality and sensitivity to his work, something found between hard millstone and wet peatland.

Joseph’s art practice is informed by their work as a curator and organiser and by his myriad collaborations, including those with the Anam Cara Collective, Anne Bean, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Ash McNaughton, zack mennell, Martin O’Brien, Marcel Sparmann, Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi, kane stonestreet, and VestAndPage.








practices:  curation / film / performance / writing
contexts:  Future Ritual / Tate  /  VSSL studio / ]ps[
years:  2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21  /  22  /  23  /  24  / 25  /