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, understanding 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 was the co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio (2020 - 2026).
Across all this work, Joseph remains committed to the live and embodied practices which welcome complexity, sensitivity, tension and difficulty.
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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Joseph Morgan Schofield, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, turning and turning, ASTERISCO, 2026. Photos by Sofia Calvert.
with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, turning and turning
Presented by Asterisco, Porto.
Solo performance art work; duration: c. 75 mins
I was invited by Aura and Asterisco to reimagine with bare feet touching the sky I yearn (2022). Revisiting this work, I thought again about loss, desire and the sensation of becoming diffuse, something about weather, something erotic, something about dying. I wrote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre curling
The velocity field wheeling
The friction, circling the rub the rub
A bird caught by a stress spiral what is the wind made of breathing he is
breathing
Things fall apart massive things are falling apart my
falling apart
the centre cannot hold holding holding cannot hold slipping turning and turning slipping releasing and turning returning he is returning into the current turning turning not remaining
Eyes staring mouth open birds turning shadows reeling surely
Surely some revelation is at hand wings spread spreading what remains
a hand a cooling hand
a hand my hand placed on the forehead, his forehead cooling slipping returning
a cooling breeze a gust a gale a tempest
a wind a wind blowing
blowing in in from the ocean
turning and turning spiralling down and down towards the ocean a wind slamming down and down returning out and out
one drop returning to the ocean
what is the wind made of an air an heir
one air joining the current and turning and widening and returning
turning widening returning
practices: curation / film / performance / writing
contexts: Future Ritual / Tate / VSSL studio / ]ps[
years: 2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 / 26