They might well be laid out under glass, but the vibrancy of the artefacts on display at the Treasures of the Brotherton’s latest exhibition is such that they seem to push the vitrines to breaking point.

Drawing on Leeds University’s cultural collections to present the pick of the archives of Women’s Aid, who can trace their origins back to 1974, and Leeds Animation Workshop, a women’s collective who came together in 1978, Animated Activism is smashing in more ways than one.

Co-curated by Holly Smith, what the complementary strands of each body’s exhibits have in common is a roughness born of readiness, the sense of hardy blooms sprouting through the pavement cracks of everyday experience. It’s a spirit whose hand-drawn, photocopied aesthetic looks back to the Paris insurgencies of May 1968 and forward to the rupture of punk in 1977, the year of a monarchist Silver Jubilee.

Indeed, they share with both those points in space and time a disavowal of prevailing orthodoxies, a rejection born of disgust. The Age of Aquarius so fervently wished for by the hippies having notably failed to take root, the cultural landscape of Britain in the mid-1970s – Bowie and Bolan apart – was boorish and boring. To the leering approbation of Roundhay’s Jimmy Savile, Pan’s People danced to the hits of the day on Top of the Pops, their teeth gritted into smiles that did their best to dazzle away a darkness encroaching from the growing death count of young women across the North of England; the victims of Peter Sutcliffe, born in Bingley. Something had to give, and, if change wasn’t going to come from the old boys’ clubs that ruled the roost, it would have to be forced from those at the bottom of the pecking order.

From the first, Women’s Aid was a campaigning organisation. It focused on the appalling toll of domestic assault and, while taking steps of its own to set up a network of refuges for women fleeing violence, it lobbied for legislation at a time when police were all too willing to dismiss the consequences of a husband’s brutality as a ‘domestic’. The subsequent Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act of 1976 was the start of what – dismayingly – remains to this day a work in progress; a baton taken up, aptly enough, by former Women’s Aid worker Jess Phillips in her role as Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.

Like Women’s Aid, Leeds Animation Workshop was motivated by a desire to get things done. The title of its first short film – cells and figures from which can be seen in the exhibition – is self-explanatory, Who Needs Nurseries? – We Do.

Unmediated and immediate, what both organisations produced still hits home. For instance, the workshop’s 1981 production, Pretend You’ll Survive, takes the scythe of mockery to the official government guidance as how to somehow live through a nuclear armageddon, and cuts it down to size, while Women’s Aid’s posters from the period include a repurposed cartoon by the Daily Express’s Giles, punning in earnest that You Can’t Beat A Woman.

Collectively, the objects on view amply make the case that whether it’s making up the metaphorical ceiling that keeps women in place, or covering the break-point of an alarm, sometimes the most constructive use of glass is in breaking it. Animated Activism takes a multi-coloured sledgehammer to the monochrome mid-70s, each shard a prism refracting rainbows of possibility.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Women’s Aid march, 1977. Credit: Women’s Aid Federation of England.

 

Animated Activism is at Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery in Leeds until December 20, 2025. For more information, click here.