Donna Huddleston’s next act

“It used to be very clean and tidy,” Donna Huddleston tells me when we meet at her space in Acme Studios, east London, where she’s worked for 17 years. There are wooden tables covered in pots of paint, brushes, stacks of pencils and large canvases of half-painted figures propped up against the walls. Huddleston is listening to the mesmeric tones of Roger Eno, but with her first-ever painting show, at White Cube Mason’s Yard just around the corner, is this the calm before or after the storm?

Huddleston is best known for her drawings of meticulously rendered figures that come alive in playful, dramatic scenes, undoubtedly a nod to her background in the theatre. “This is the first time I’ve painted,” Huddleston tells me. “I’ve made some watercolours and some small works but I’ve never painted at this scale or with acrylics.” Huddleston was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1970, and raised in Australia, where she studied art and theatre. “At theatre design school I did a lot of technical costume drawing. CAD (computer-aided design) had just come in, but we still drafted a lot of things by hand. Costume drawing was where I started to develop my figures – in this world of performance – and where I learned about creating a sense of play with costume,” Huddleston tells me. “The psychology of performance is hugely important to my work. There’s a kind of presence I’m looking for. I know it when I find it.”

After her studies, Huddleston got absorbed into the film world. “I was offered to work with costume designer Kym Barrett. She was designing the costumes for The Matrix. Fox Studios had just opened in Sydney at the time, so all of us theatre design students fell into the film industry. It was incredible in a lot of ways, but I decided not to pursue that career path,” Huddleston adds. “I was working on big-budget films, so there wasn’t a lot of room for experimenting artistically. You’re just one cog in the machine. So I left a film I was working on in the Arizona desert and came to London to get back to making my own work.”

Huddleston went on to exhibit her first UK solo exhibition of drawings, ‘The Exhausted Student’, at The Drawing Room in 2019, before being taken on by Simon Lee Gallery. So why painting and why now? “Because I couldn’t quite get to all the pictures I wanted to make with drawing – the process is so long,” says Huddleston. “The way I was drawing was very taxing on my hand. I had ideas that I couldn’t get to fast enough. I also wanted more colour saturation. The style of painting I’m doing is quite graphic.” The flat, richly-coloured surfaces and layered planes of Huddleston’s paintings are reminiscent of stage sets, setting the scene for her characters’ stories to unfold. “I’m drawn to films and directors that work as companies,” Huddleston says, referring to the show’s title. “Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Éric Rohmer, who had groups of actors that they returned to again and again. Even in theatre, directors have the same company of performers. The big thing for me with this exhibition was including figures I’d drawn in the past. I was thinking of them as part of my theatrical company.”

‘Company’ also marks a shift in scale for Huddleston, who has let her figures walk out from the paper and let them stretch their (newly acquired) legs on canvas. “I’ve drawn figures this size but just a torso, not necessarily the full body. I wanted them to be human scale, so you feel their presence in the room with you,” Huddleston tells me. “They’ve always felt human scale to me, even when I’ve been drawing them quite small, their world is big to me.” Looking at the paintings, I can’t help but see a subtle likeness between some of the figures and the artist herself. I wonder if self-portraiture is inescapable for an artist who has such an intimate relationship with the figures she creates. “When you paint figures there’s always an element of yourself in them. There’s an element of yourself in everything. I do find my face can appear in some pictures. I’m physically feeling the figure as I paint them – their posture, their stance, their composition. So I think naturally I place myself into them.”

Huddleston’s work references classical painting, art deco forms and styling from the ‘70s and ‘80s, although the artist doesn’t deliberately seek to conjure any specific time or place. “These works are set in their own world, very much in the present. They’re not about nostalgia or looking back,” Huddleston explains. “Of course, I use references from different sources – film, fashion, novels. For a lot of these works I wanted to bring medieval aesthetics into the world of these characters, like in certain costumes, but I don’t deliberately make them look like they’re from any particular period. Naturally I’m informed by the world I grew up in. I have to discover what the scenes are as I make them, and they change all the time.”

Huddleston’s ‘Company’ seems like more than just a new body of work; it is a continuation of an ongoing dialogue, with herself and her audience. By revisiting figures from her previous drawings and reimagining them in paint, she creates a narrative thread that runs through her career, linking past, present and future. Huddleston can feel this momentum: “You know when you’re beginning to get somewhere, you can feel it. The figures feel quite present already, but there’s still work to be done.”