Joseph Morgan Schofield makes queer ritual action. Often expressed through performance art action, moving image and text, the sweating sensate body is at the heart of this practice. Their work often inolves 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, human and otherwise. While Joseph lives 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, his works exist between brutality and sensitivity, between hard millstone grit and weat peatland.

Joseph’s art practice is informed by his work as a curator and organiser and by a host of 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. 

For much of the last 10 years, Joseph’s work has been preoccupied with anticipatory and, eventually, realised grief. Alongside creating personal psychomagical actions, he has sought to hold a non-didactic space for those witnessing the work to confront their own emotions, memories and processes. In this new time, after life/s, they are reflecting on how to continue making, sharing and witnessing this work. He remains open to invitations from those who feel a resonance with this work.

joseph@futureritual.co.uk  

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA, London, 2022. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Live Art is a live-ing practice, an expression of the stuff of life. My practice is an expression of the stuff of my life - memories, relationships, experiences, revelations - rendered not as autobiography but live-ing poetry.

As a child, I would often go out onto the wet and windy moorland which formed my adolescent horizon, collecting the bones of sheep for my mother to use in drawing classes.

Years later, in states of shock and grief, she and I would return to these moors, walking, wading, gathering these bones. They became totems and their memories were amongst my first materials. 

withstand//standwith (installation/relics), , ‘Its Offal’, Art HouSE1, London, 2016. 

withstand//standwith, Future Ritual, Space Art + Technology, London, 2017. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Later, I would come to understand these performances as psychomagic acts, as attempts to enter the wound and pass a threshold that could not be passed in ordinary life. Bound and kneeling after Zurbaràn’s Agnus Dei, I crossed and recrossed a path of sharp stones, holding, washing and burying these sheep bones, my knees cut and bleeding on the rocks.

Around this work I received visions and dreams which convinced me of the efficacy of performance as ritual, of the possibility of spiritual and emotional transformation. Through the years I have gathered many more of these totems, always from the same places, always found by following the signs of the land and intuition. I feel a responsibility to these bones and to their memories. I gild, char, mark and hold them, one day to return them to those wild hills. I blow oxygen across them, thinking of the dead as gone and not-yet-gone in my holding. 

The cutting, piercing and breaking of skin has remained a potent way of crossing the threshold, rewounding, rewinding, rewidling. In making video work during the pandemic, my body would not bleed. In live works, before and afterwards, life has flowed forth. Erotic and empathetic responses to blood pleasurably, necessarily contaminating the experience of loss, insisting on life.

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA, London, 2022. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA, London, 2022. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

A Felling, collaboration with Ash McNaughton and Marcel Sparmann, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 2024. Photo by Kirsten McTernan.

the pink sky reflects the bloody earth, VO Curations, 2019. Photo by Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz.

The land remembers. Everything dies but some things remain. My grandfather was a railway man and the warden of a village church atop the Pennine moorland. Here, on the moor, the decomposition of organic matter is frustrated. The rain comes and soaks the land. The sodden land hinders the flow of oxygen. The remains of plants and animals do not fully decay but accumulate and compact. Slowly they become peat, a kind of mineral rich earth which stores carbon and memories. On the moor the lines between things are less clear: the water becomes the mist, the clouds become the stones; in the peat, the shapes of animals and plants and memories ease not longer split but whole.

In the 1940s, my father saw an apparition in the chapel. Almost 80 years later, he remembered:

I looked across at the side altar and there was this figure, just stood there. I can just see it to this day - I aren’t the sort of chap that imagines stuff I don’t think. I just felt this cold shiver down my back and this figure were just stood there by the altar and I just stood there, I was just rooted to the spot. I sort of pulled myself together and made for the door and then it just disappeared this figure. But it was the strangest experience of my life. And I’m convinced to this day that I’d definitely seen something. I suppose it was an apparition, but it made me feel really cold. What it was I have no idea, but it wasn’t imagination I’m sure of that.

I placed his words in these teeming forms, a film I made with the artist Fenia Kotsopoulou. We went out onto the moors, already thick with ghosts, seeking to disappear into the peat archive, the wind body. It was August 2020, a breath between lockdowns. The hillsides were made purple by calluna vulgaris, heather, of the Ericaceae family. My father’s name is Eric.

these teeming forms, VSSL studio, London, 2021. Photo by zack mennell.

these teeming forms, Blackstone Edge, 2021. Photo by zack mennell.

In some mythologies, heather is a plant of the inner world, of death and ancestors. Scottish legend tells that white heather was stained purple by blood.

In Venice in 2023, not long after my brother had died, I sucked honey from the roots of a heather plant and wrote ‘we shall not see the same sky again’ whilst my body disappeared amidst the projection of one of our hillsides, covered in the flowering calluna.

I continue to seek the experience of sublimation into the weather earth body. Binding my head in an emergency blanket, I create shapes with my inhalation and exhalation, until I run out of breath and enter another world inside this mask of gold.

untitled, Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 2023. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

devotion : seduction, Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 2020. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

I have made many projects with Benjamin Sebastian. In 2021, Benjamin invited me to mark the 10th anniversary of ]performance space[ as part of a 10 hour action at Ugly Duck.

There was a powerful and heavy energy in the room. I spread a tonne of earth on the ground and gilded and bore the skeleton of a sheep, complete except for its skull, which I could not find, and held together by hardened sinew and the wax which fell from candles in my mouth.

wax falling on my body

Later Martin O’Brien who has been working with coughing and coffins, crawls a coffin to me. I cover it in earth until he can no longer hold the weight, and later we carry it around the space, knocking on the sides with a brush and spade, call and response.

falling for rapture 

Later Anne Bean and I look at each other for a long time, me reflected in her mirror, she reflected in my spade.

untitled, PSX: 10 Hours, Ugly Duck, 2021. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Later, I sit on my earth and Martin’s coffin, lips pierced and bleeding, holding these bones.

falling for loss

Later still, I shovel a tonne of earth into Martin’s empty coffin. I do not remember if I weep.

falling for life

My father was a joiner and coffin builder and later became an undertaker, giving funerals for those who died atop the moors.

untitled, PSX: 10 Hours, Ugly Duck, 2021. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Seeking to understand something about gender, violence, sex and endings, I dressed spaces in emergency blankets and spoke of those who name us  civilization’s collapse. I spoke of those who died from AIDS related illnesses who I did not get to know, I spoke of the landowners who burn the moors and flood the towns, and I spoke of endings.

For as long as I have known death I have feared it.

Going out on moors and fells and mountains has revealed a different kind of time. I am different in high places, less I. ‘ ’ try to share this kind of sublimation through artmaking. ‘ ’ try to live this knowledge down on the ground. It is difficult. Maybe this is the practice I will dedicate myself to now.

Here Comes The Sun, ]performance space[, 2019. Photo by Jemima Yong.

A week after my father’s death I made a ritual performance with artists Ash McNaughton and Marcel Sparmann. We split apart a table and broke plates. Ash made a wing from hot wax across their back. Marcel spoke apologies and times into the space. I shaved wood from a timber plank with my father’s plane, holding the shavings in my arms until they fell or flew away. Ash’s voice called out through the space and I placed 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.

Like my first performance, this performance affirmed the efficacy of the practice. It was the only response. My mother and my lover sat in the audience, triangles of loss converging. 

In the wake of these experiences, I question the work come. There is a new vulnerability. A sense of preciousness and a resistance to speaking of its value amidst all the other works and practices and ideas. Life calls and this live-ing work responds. What more?

A Felling, IKLECTIC, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

‘One of the special magics of performance art is the vibrant possibility of the live encounter’

Interview in Run Riot, 2021, with Adam Bloodworth - An interview reflecting on Joseph’s practice ahead of PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK.

words by Daniella Valz Gen, 2022

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