Hello Juliet Sugg. Thank you for taking part in this interview. Thank you for taking part in this interview.
Q. Could you explain to our readers who you are and what type of art work you do?
A. I am Juliet Sugg, an artist, lecturer and unapologetic explorer of the feminine in all its messy, erotic, and gloriously unruly forms. My practice slips between painting, installation and performance, but at its heart it is about what happens when pleasure and disruption collide.
I have never been satisfied with the way femininity is often handed to us — polite, neat, polished, singular and endlessly consumable. So I choose to mess it up a bit. I often exaggerate my own portrait, playing with the gaze and inviting a kind of permissive voyeurism: what happens when the feminine image teases, looks back, and refuses to behave?
For me this work is a kind of necessary activism — a way to make images that are inclusive, unruly and alive. I see the privilege of being an artist as the chance to produce both pleasure and thought: to draw people in with beauty, humour or seduction, and then let something wilder, stranger, more sensual emerge.
That is what I am exploring in my practice-based PhD: reframing the so-called monstrous feminine not as something shameful or frightening, but as a source of empowerment and radically liberating energy. In other words, I like my art to lure you in sweetly — and then make you feel the true, complex and diverse ways in which we perform and experience the feminine.
Q. How and why did you get started into the Monstrous Feminine art work?
A. My journey into the monstrous feminine began with a simple but unsettling question: why is female sexuality so often framed as dangerous, shameful, or excessive? I wanted to understand where those images came from — the witch, the siren, the femme fatale — and how they still shape the way women and femmes are imagined today. Why are we still so frightened of them?
As a lifelong horror fan, I was fascinated by performance, role-play, and the strange pull of fear. I wanted to know why these archetypes repeat across centuries and cultures, and what it was about them that drew me back again and again. Ultimately, I wanted to return to the roots of these figures and find empathy in them, rather than condemnation.
It also became a very personal route into healing and acceptance of my own body and sexuality. By embracing what had once been framed as excessive or shameful, I began to find joy and creativity in those spaces, turning what felt like taboo into something empowering and celebratory.
Rather than treating the monstrous feminine as a negative, I became interested in how it could be reclaimed — as a source of erotic charge, humour, rebellion and possibility. It was a way of saying: if society calls female desire monstrous, then perhaps the monster isn’t the threat — perhaps the monster is the key.
So my work leans into those qualities: grotesque, playful, excessive, abject, unruly. For me, it is not about reproducing fear, but about twisting it — transforming the language of monstrosity into a space where pleasure, imagination and new ways of seeing the body can flourish
Q. For you why is it important to show off the Feminine image?
A. For me, showing the feminine image is inseparable from showing pleasure. Too often the feminine has been reduced to something ornamental or controlled — made polite, consumable, or stripped of autonomous desire. I want to undo that by creating images where femininity is charged, excessive, erotic, grotesque, messy, tender — alive in all its contradictions.
It is also deeply political. At a time when conservatism, puritanism, and a regression into patriarchal, non-inclusive values are tightening their grip in the West, I see the work as a form of protest. Mine is a protest that seduces. It is about turning the act of looking into an act of pleasure and resistance at the same time.
What excites me is how audiences respond. I have had people tell me they felt both aroused and unsettled by the same piece — that it gave them permission to see their own bodies and desires differently. For me, that is the point: it invites desire and complicates it, it arouses while it unsettles, and it insists that sexuality, gender and identity can’t be flattened into narrow roles.
That is why I show the feminine image — because it can be both sensual and radical, a reminder that pleasure itself can be a powerful form of defiance.
Q. You have also co-founded the Deviant Collective and lead the MA Illustration and Visual Media at London College of Communication. Could you explain what both of these are all about?
A. The Deviant Collective is something I co-founded with writer Tracy Heather Johnson, and it is exactly what the name suggests — a space for deviance. We create exhibitions, publications and live events that celebrate the erotic, the monstrous, the funny, and the unsettling sides of art and writing. It is about giving permission: to play with taboo, to explore desire, to make space for work that does not behave. We wanted to build a platform where creativity could be both thought-provoking and deliciously untamed — where audiences feel seduced into a conversation rather than lectured at.
Alongside that, I lead the MA Illustration and Visual Media at London College of Communication. It is an experimental postgraduate course where students are encouraged to push their work far beyond the boundaries of traditional illustration — into moving image, performance, sound, digital media, you name it. What excites me most is that it is international, diverse, and fearless: students use their practice to explore identity, politics, sexuality and pleasure in ways that constantly surprise me.
For me, the two — Deviant Collective and the MA — feed each other. Both are about risk-taking, curiosity, and opening up new ways of seeing. They have spaces where the curious meets the intellectual, where pleasure is taken seriously, and where deviance isn’t just allowed — it is celebrated
Q. Lastly can you let our readers know what you have coming up in the near future?
A. I have got a lot. I am excited about right now. I am working on a series of video essays with The Evolution of Horror podcast, exploring the monstrous feminine and how horror tropes tap into our deepest desires and fears.
Tracy and I are also creating a new set of zines on the monstrous feminine in film — part critique, part provocation, part love letter to cinema’s darkest women. With the Deviant Collective we’re developing further live events too, where the erotic meets the unsettling and pleasure becomes a form of protest.
I will be continuing podcast appearances in the new year — including The Evolution of Horror and Monstrous Flesh — and I am especially excited about a Monstrous Feminine exhibition with my MA Illustration & Visual Media students, who are bringing fresh, fearless approaches to the theme.
And of course, my practice-based PhD is central — reframing the monstrous feminine as a source of empowerment, erotic energy and radical possibility, feeding into upcoming talks and exhibitions.
What excites me most is finding ways to connect with people, creating experiences that are thought-provoking, sensual, and maybe just a little dangerous.
Thank you very much Juliet Sugg for this great interview Keep shining lovely lady.
To find out more about Juliet Sugg and her amazing artwork make sure to check out her website