JMS is a curator, artist and creative producer. Underpinning these entangled practices is an understanding of art as an embodied encounter between self and other, place and mystery. Joseph’s work explores performance / art as a contemporary modality of ritual, an / other way of experiencing and inhabiting body / space / time, as a technology of processing / mourning / desiring / communing / dreaming.
Expressions of this belief / research have emerged as performances, films and texts, as curatorial and producing projects, as collaborative contexts, talks and workshops.
Much of their / his independent work is held by Future Ritual, 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@futureritual.co.uk
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Future 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 /