Activating Changes in Reality with Queer Ritual | Joseph Winsborrow

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Joseph Winsborrow is an artist and writer whose practice is heavily focused on personal rituals and utilising historic magical practice within his work. His poetry processes personal experience and can remain as lone works, or be formed into a collective or live performance. Winsborrow's current practice focuses on the use of sigils as invocations to activate changes in reality, as well as existing as part of a performance or in their own right.

Joseph Winsborrow, Safety Net, 2017

Exhibition co-curated with Amethyst Jennings

Surface Gallery, Nottingham

Image courtesy of the artist via: https://josephwinsborrow.uk/safety-net

I was particularly drawn to Winsborrow's exhibition and performance "Safety Net" as it brought together elements of life performance and pre-formed art in a way I hadn't seen before. The above still is particularly interesting to me as it depicts Winsborrow conducting a tarot reading, something that would historically have been hidden for fear of harm, amongst people who weren't taking part but didn't think twice about it going on next to them.

Joseph Winsborrow, Ritual for New Dreaming, 2021

Welcome to the New Earth, Black Hole Club

Vivid Projects, Digbeth

Images courtesy of the author

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to see Winsborrow's "Ritual for New Dreaming" as part of the Black Hole Club's 'Welcome to the New Earth' collection of activities. I spoke to him briefly about his practice and the Black Hole Club collective and their work, and gained insight on how he forms his practice in a practical sense. I gained insight about the totality of the experience of a live performance and how it should engage all the senses which is what informed his use of the smells, colours, and textures used in his performances. This is something that I wanted to take into my own practice and give more careful consideration to.

I find this practically applicable to workshops as well as performances as I find that they inhabit the same space- one of education and safety through shared experience.

Whilst workshops are traditionally transactional (the one leading is imparting knowledge and the participant is gaining it), performance is seen as transactional in a more superficial sense (the performer is offering a consumable service to the viewer which is absorbed or ruminated upon for no longer than it is being consumed. In my practice I utilise performance and workshops as one in the same, spaces of multi-faceted and multi-directional learning and teaching.