Wragg, Terry Animation Artist

Terry Wragg was born in 1949 in Sheffield and joined the not-for-profit film collective Leeds Animation Workshop in the 1970s. She worked on a number of campaigning films on social issues, many with feminist themes, including Who Needs Nurseries? We Do (1977) and Give Us A Smile (1983). She taught at the Workers’ Educational Association in Leeds, delivered animation workshops in a number of settings including prisons and schools, and has been involved in programming film festivals in Leeds.

In this interview she talks about the women’s movement and the workshop movement in the UK, and the experience of collective working, sharing both professional/creative ideas and childcare. She describes the mechanics of her working day as an animator, the processes of animation and her involvement with the film trade union ACTT. She also reflects on her pleasure in visiting film processing laboratories in Soho, London. She discusses animation as a space which offered women a way into film-making, and the impact of feminist film festivals on her film-making practice. Terry continues to make campaigning films; her most recent - They Call Us Maids: The Domestic Workers Story – was released in 2015.

©Melanie Bell

Terry asked that the following Foreword be included with her interview, which she wrote after reviewing her transcript:

‘Contributing to these interviews was a pleasant experience, but – from my point of view at least – an unplanned, unstructured one. I had been expecting questions about professional life and was somewhat thrown off guard when asked about my childhood, family and early education. From then on I just responded to the questions in a spontaneous way, not making any serious attempt to summarise or contextualise the nearly forty years of my working life. Later, on reading the interview transcripts, I became aware of many omissions. Most don’t matter – but one thing disturbed me. Given that the transcripts contained so much personal background material and chatty detail, they gave the impression of someone who had led a ‘normal’ heterosexual life – simply by not stating otherwise. A specific question had not been asked – and why should it be? To ask it would probably have felt intrusive; to offer the information without being asked would have felt inappropriate – and yet, because nothing was said, any reader without prior knowledge would surely presume I was straight. My chief motive for participating in this history project was to offer support to young women of the future – to give them the reassurance that we missed, when starting out in the 1970s and 80s: that making films is something women can do, and have already done. All the more reason to make sure of giving a similar reassurance to aspiring lesbian, gay and bisexual film-makers in years to come: we have done this before, you are not alone.’ (Terry Wragg, 2016).