Ted Rogers, Artist

Margate, UK
Photographs and Interview by Sheila Lam

“Something that matters to me in life, not just in art, but definitely comes through the art, is that on a very personal level, I care about sanctity."

Ted Rogers speaks with the kind of sensitivity that only comes from thinking deeply about things most people shy away from. Sitting in their Margate home, where the walls tell the story of their life’s progression and the quiet weight of accumulated meaning, the artist and former dancer traces a path from primary school sticker designs and skateboarding to contemporary painting, from nightclub dancefloors to gallery walls, always returning to this central truth: some things must be held sacred.

As a queer, non-binary person navigating both the art world and their own spirituality, Ted has had to carve out space for what might seem like contradictions. "Where's the last place you would expect to find a club queer? In the church," they observe. "But is it? No." For Ted, who goes by their middle name, sanctity isn't about religious orthodoxy.

Named after their ancestor Christopher Wren, the architect who designed St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Ted only recently determined this lineage. "I had ignored my ancestry because I thought it was probably quite boring to look at," they admit. "I always felt very displaced from my family. So I didn't consider looking back. But after I did, I'm like, of course I'm a fucking church person. I've always been obsessed with them, not because of the church, but because of the space."

It's the atmosphere that draws them in: the architecture, the oldness, the smells, the way sound moves from complete silence into extreme resonance and back again. In an invasively loud world, churches offer something increasingly rare: a quiet enough place to think. As their friend, writer and bookmaker, Marcelo Anciano devises, “The first religious experience was through the artist shaman. They accessed the ecstatic state and came back from that experience with stories and objects that balanced the society. Artists today are the shamans of yesterday. We entered the zone and brought back objects that will rebalance the individual and the world through the creative act.”

This commitment to depth, to holding things sacred in a world that constantly demands surface and quickness, runs through every aspect of Ted’s practice. Their visual language—whether in movement, charcoal drawings, ceramics, or large-scale paintings—emerges not from calculated decisions but from something more fundamental. "Nobody knows," they laugh when I ask how they choose their medium. "You're supposed to follow threads. You're supposed to just follow instinct, follow a higher power."

The work itself resists easy classification, too. Flowers that might be people, people that might be mountains, forms that could be tumours or vibrations of aggression. "I guess for me it's important that it feels alive," they explain. The aliveness comes not from technical perfection but from the act itself. "Oftentimes it's literally about listening to music, writing something down, and then hurling myself at it."

The move from dance to physical mediums was partly practical: "I could make £500 a week working 14 hours a day, six days a week, to bleed on a dancefloor, or I can sell a drawing for a few hundred pounds in much less time.” But ultimately, the move to art was mostly intuitive. For years, people called them an artist while they insisted on being a dancer. "I was like, stop trying to call me an artist. I'm not creating art.” It took time and full-time commitment to the practice to finally stand in that word. "This year, this is what I do full time: I make art."

Where this all leads feels both clear and beautifully undefined. Ted envisions becoming what they call a "wealthy art daddy", not for accumulation's sake, but to build the spaces they want to see, to house the people who need housing, to pay for the trans surgeries that need paying for.

"There's a world where I get to potentially make enough money to build the kind of spaces I want and share the knowledge I want to share," they say. "I want to give, whether it's just my raw expression or whether that raw expression gives me the currency that I need to exist, the way that my destiny is set in this world." In Ted’s world, sanctity and generosity are inseparable; both require holding something precious enough to share it.●