If you had been wandering the corridors of the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, Sydney, sometime around the year 1997, you might have happened upon a young, overworked Donna Huddleston. The artist documented her experiences studying set and costume in the monumental 2019 work The Exhausted Student, in which a pale waif, having fainted, is held aloft by a group of concerned, impeccably dressed undergrads in a sling of milky green drapery, pieta-like. Informed by Huddleston’s student years, the artist’s first exhibition at London’s Simon Lee Gallery stages a one-woman show over eleven unabashedly theatrical new works on paper. The drawings here mark a departure from The Exhausted Student’s tableau form, instead focusing in on strange intimacies and individual dramas. Several pieces show the artist herself, roughly life-size, donning various glamorous disguises: slinky, ruched dresses with plunging necklines; ruffled poet’s blouses under tailored camel coats; immaculately coiffed wigs. She slips from frame to frame like a woman on the run. Most are rendered entirely in Caran d’Ache pencil, a painstakingly slow process and unforgiving material which lends itself naturally to the artist’s taste for minute detail against flat, overlapping planes and tightly choreographed mise-en-scene. Blocks of color are lightly flecked with …

Sometimes an artwork responds to the world outside; sometimes the world outside responds to an artwork; and sometimes neither knows of the other, yet each is enhanced by it all the same. Such a moment occurred recently when one could march down Piccadilly, in protest with and in the presence of tens of thousands of women, and turn into a side street, past cars, jammed, Porsches, Bentleys, and Rolls, in each a man tapping agitated fingers upon a leather steering wheel, enter the glass door of a gallery and there find a mannequin, female, with long crimped hair and army fatigues, an assault rifle at rest by her side. The work is by the Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret, and takes its name—Les guérillères XII (all works 2016)—from the influential (one can scarcely say “seminal”) 1969 novel by Monique Wittig, which imagines a new society established and run by lesbian warriors. In the original French, they are described as “elles,” not “women” but a differently universal “they,” a simple inversion of the masculine collective pronoun “ils” one usually finds in French; Perret’s own narrative of a female commune, The Crystal Frontier, which she has been writing—and making artwork from—since the late 1990s, …