Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to create future ritual.
“My work is formed through live and embodied practices. I organise, facilitate, make performances and films, and write. Underpinning all this work is an understanding of performance as a potent contemporary modality for ritual, by which I mean: it sharpens our attention and asks us to be participant and witness; it facilitates us to inhabit time differently; it is a technology for processing, mourning, desiring and communing".
The work is characterised by a deeply felt sense of yearning, both for that which is lost and that which is yet to arrive. I am often engaged in practices of channeling, duration, and exhaustion and divination. Much of this practice is relational, emerging through encounters between my sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of other agents - human and otherwise, including memory, geology, weather and myth. I have worked with and across the South Pennine Moors for a number of years, and also responsively to other sites and contexts on different time scales.
The performances and films have been presented throughout the UK and Europe, including recently by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), ]performance s p a c e[, IKLECTIC , and Venice International Performance Art Week. My writing has been commissioned by Chapter Arts Centre, ]ps[, and Undercurrent (USA).
