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, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, Future Ritual, ICA (London), 2022. Photo by zack mennell.
with bare feet touching the sky I yearn
Produced by Future Ritual. Commissioned and presented by ICA (London). Funded by Arts Council England.
Solo performance art work; duration: c. 90 mins
Underpinned by a deep sense of longing that is about both loss and desire, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn calls to a queer futurity which is wilder and more raw than the anxious, ossifying present. This futurity is multiplicitous - shrouded, erotic, and non-linear. It is bound up with more-than-human ecologies and, like life itself, it is chaotic and non-binary.
Prophetic fictions compost with dried flowers, soil and natural pigments; a wormhole is opened in the earth and the boundaries between human subjectivity and the worlds beyond are made porous; sweaty, bloody gestural embodiments of yearning and rudimentary chroma-keying facilitates a symbolic, DIY diffusion of selfhood; and the poetic resonances of texts, movements, materials and actions are offered to those gathered as a divinatory device. The work offers no clear path but rather an invitation - to step into a more mythic time, a space for dreaming, grieving, desiring and communing.
Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Joseph Morgan Schofield, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, Future Ritual, ICA (London), 2022. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Response
words by Daniella Valz Gen
Soil
A suspended carcass Ribbon
A metal bucket
A video projection
A spade
Candles
Needles
The scene itself is full of ghosts and expectation.
I wait in the red light and smell the soil,
the hum gets into my spine :
I feel my inner waters vibrate as I look at dry bones.
The sizzle of a blowtorch Smoke, a faint scent of gas
(My eyes burn)
Embers flicker on the tip of a wooden pole
Stone on a metal spade Stone in a mouth,
play
Knocking about knock knock knock
(A call, persistent)
What is this sense of foreboding? Where are we?
What else is there?
Who?
The sound of fire bursts
Black wax drips on Joseph’s pale chest
—Tattoos Sigils Lace—
Like the carcass that presides over the space
As if saying: we too are already dead
We are with death
in a tangle of shimmery ribbon
An open mouth pulling on cord
Across space Across time Across life
I feel Joseph’s mouth in my spine and my rib cage: pulling at my tendons, my own carcass.
Psychopomp childlike and in black satin, their flesh pierced
as if to say:
I’m here I bleed I’m here
Alive
(I’m here with you)
From blood to clay
From red to fade
A desire to exit
A gesture towards absolute presence and effacement at the same time
The space has been pierced
All that’s left is a sad tender holding
Joseph Morgan Schofield, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, Future Ritual, ICA (London), 2022. 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 /