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 ListJoseph Morgan Schofield, these teeming forms, 2021. Photo by zack mennell.
these teeming forms
Commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[. Presented by ]ps[, ICA (London), VSSL studio, Chisenhale Studioes (2021) and Venice International Performance Art Week (2023). Funded by Arts Council England.
Single-channel video work; duration: 28.33
This film was made on the windswept South Pennine Moors. These hills, wet and wily, contain vast peat deposits, produced over thousands of years as normative processes of decomposition are frustrated by the great quantity of water that falls on the hills. The peat is a collage of animal and plant matter, minerals and weather. Performance actions to camera are collaged with cyanotype printing processes of analogue photographic documentation, speculative texts and an original score, as the artist walks out into the land holding grief and seeking connection. Like the body, the land is an archive. The film is framed by an interview with the artist’s father, who speaks of his own remembrance of a haunting adolescent encounter many decades previously.
Shot in a breath between lockdowns in 2021, these teeming forms is a sensate and mythic film, imagining a process of wilding - of entering the land and being opened by it. Memory and desire, history and loss, future and fantasy become porous, contributing to a textural and sensate meditation on living.
Joseph Morgan Schofield - concept, editing, performance, text
Fenia Kotsopoulou - cinemtaography, editing
Mitchell Sowden - composition
Zack McGuinness - analogue photography
Eric Schofield - performance, text
daz disley - audio post-production, colour correction
With thanks to Benjamin Sebastian, Es Morgan, and MycoLective: Ama Josephine Budge, Angela Chan, Fiona MacDonald, Laurel Hadleigh, Linda Persson, and Sonia E Barrett.
practices: curation / film / performance / writing
contexts: Future Ritual / Tate / VSSL studio / ]ps[
years: 2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 /