Donna Huddleston Crafts Narratives Through Theatrical Worlds and Personal Memory in “Company”

In “Company,” Donna Huddleston crafts an enigmatic world where theatricality meets timelessness, debuting her first solo exhibition with White Cube last month in London (September 6—8, 2024). Known for her delicate works in watercolor and colored pencil, this new body of work saw Huddleston embracing acrylic paint, offering a fresh yet subtle expansion of her figurative practice. In her hands, solitary figures emerged against pale, atmospheric backdrops, conjuring an otherworldly stage where the thresholds between performance, memory, and identity blur.

A trained theater designer, Huddleston’s fascination with scenography permeates her compositions, which evoke a sense of suspended drama. Each figure, poised as if caught in mid-performance, inhabits an ambiguous, atemporal space. The artist’s influences—ranging from medieval portraiture to the writings of Tennessee Williams—infuse the work with a rich intertextuality, making each piece a layered narrative in itself. Take Gentleman Caller, for instance, a striking nod to Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, where the titular character is reimagined as an androgynous dandy, intertwining gender and time in a way that feels both historical and modern.

Donna Huddleston Debuted “Company” at White Cube in London

At the heart of “Company” lay Huddleston’s exploration of performative identity and the human condition. Whether inspired by medieval architecture or the dramas of 1970s cinema, her works invited viewers into a delicate balance of artifice and authenticity. Figures like those in Recital—who reappear from her earlier works—stand-alone but speak volumes about the narratives they carry, inviting the audience to scrutinize them as they would actors on a stage. The show’s large-scale paintings—spanning the emotional range from introspection to performative tension—imbued each moment with a cinematic, almost mythic quality, while pencil drawings retain her signature precision and lightness, bridging past and present.

In a conversation with Whitewall, Huddleston reflected on the materials, themes, and theatrical underpinnings of her latest work. Her musings offered a glimpse into the creative mind behind “Company,” where memory and fiction, the personal and the universal, coalesce to form deeply evocative tableaux.

WHITEWALL: Your wonderful exhibition “Company” introduces a new medium in your practice with acrylic paint. How did this shift from watercolor and colored pencil to acrylics impact the way you approached this body of work?

DONNA HUDDLESTON: Working on both drawings and paintings simultaneously gave me greater freedom in terms of scale, color, and tone, and in a material sense, it changed everything. The decision to make human-scale figures in my paintings was something working with acrylics made possible for this exhibition—purely in practical terms.

WW: The theatrical and scenographic elements in your work are deeply tied to your background in theatre design. How does your experience in set design continue to inform the way you construct the narratives and atmospheres in your paintings?

DH: There’s a great cinematography term, “Authentic Artificiality,” that resonates with how I compose images and build tension within the works. I approach a new body of work through research, reading, writing, and watching films to develop an atmosphere, which is the container of these influences. It’s an atmosphere that feels three-dimensional and one I must hold onto continuously while making a body of work. You could think of it as a stage that holds the scenes.

WW: The figures in “Company” often appear solitary and suspended in a timeless space, yet they carry an internal weight. What is it about these solitary, atemporal characters that continues to captivate you, and how do they reflect the personal or collective narratives you wish to convey?

DH: One of my aims was to present the figures as members of a theatrical company and to introduce them to the audience quite directly. For this, the single-colored backgrounds and solitary figure compositions are important. There is a moment when a figure feels present to me, and this is when I know a work is completed. I would hope the viewer then has their own dialogue.

Donna Huddleston References Brutalist Architecture, 1970s Fashion, and More

WW: You’ve spoken about the lack of hierarchy in your references, drawing from sources as diverse as medieval portraiture, Brutalist architecture, and 1970s fashion. How do you navigate between such diverse references, and do these varied influences reflect an underlying emotional or psychological landscape you’re trying to explore?

DH: There’s no need to question them, as I work intuitively. References and research are just starting points. All I am doing is seeking a form that enables these things to express themselves.

WW: Your work often plays with the idea of performance, not only in its theatrical references but also in the way your characters pose for scrutiny. How do you see the relationship between performance, identity, and the way we present ourselves in everyday life?

DH: Let me answer this by example. I am a great admirer of the plays of Tennessee Williams. He often takes autobiographical experiences but then transforms them into dramatic form. The requirements of that form are largely technical, and this is the same for me when I make my work. I am more interested in the individual than in identity. I don’t have a completely fixed idea when I start a work.

“I am more interested in the individual than in identity. I don’t have a completely fixed idea when I start a work.”

—Donna Huddleston

WW: There seems to be a delicate tension between the classical and the contemporary in your figures, particularly in how you juxtapose characters from different time periods, such as in Hanna. What draws you to this dialogue between past and present?

DH: In the work Hanna, I was interested in the psychological space that opened up with an actress looking at herself through the guise of one character to another. There are many things at play there that I’m interested in: the double, transformation, acting itself.

Infusing Memory and Narrative into New Paintings

WW: Memory seems to play an important role in your practice, as suggested in works like Sylvia’s Mother, which evokes a personal atmosphere. How do you approach the balance between deeply felt elements and the universally relatable in your art, and is there a particular emotion or narrative you hope viewers take away from your work?

DH: This is interesting as the question almost answers itself because Sylvia’s Mother doesn’t, in fact, stem from any direct personal recollections from my childhood. It’s a deeply felt composition but a purely fictional one. Memory and the autobiographical are infused in the making of all my works, but I would hope the viewer reads it through their own experience of looking.

“Memory and the autobiographical are infused in the making of all my works, but I would hope the viewer reads it through their own experience of looking,”

—Donna Huddleston

WW: In your opinion, how has your artistic practice evolved over the years, especially in terms of how you approach materials, themes, and the narratives you wish to communicate? What directions do you see your work heading toward in the future?

DH: It has become larger and more complex. I don’t know—that’s the question.