Guest Post – Hold Your Tongue
This guest blog is from Ailie Rutherford an artist, activist and co-director of the Feminist Exchange Network in Glasgow. I invited her to respond to the exhibition Domestic Bliss, which I initially curated in 2019 as part of ongoing commissions and associate artist tenures exploring themes within the work. I was particularly interested in an explicit feminist response to the show looking at labour, economics and queer histories within the context of a public collection. The initial invitation was for an R&D period January – March 2026, with our studio available to her for a couple of hours a week. This time was to think about the response to Domestic Bliss and for her proposal to tap into an area of mutual curiosity both within her practice, but also the work of this museum, particularly through the themes in the exhibition. Katie Bruce, 24 February 2026
Hold Your Tongue
Ailie Rutherford, February 2026
I began this research after making a trip to the Witches’ Maze in Perthshire, where a likely ancestor, born Isabel Rutherford, was one of the last people in Scotland to be killed under the Witchcraft Act. Known locally to be a healer, they were accused of consorting with the devil and of changing their name to Viceroy – a male name, a regal title and the name of a butterfly: a shape-shifter. I read this story as a tale of historic persecution of gender queerness and more-than-human kinship – one of the many queer histories less documented in accounts of the Scottish witch trials.
Taking this as my starting point for the research, a search for “witch” in the Glasgow Life Museums’ collection database throws up images of head restraints referred to as witches’ branks or scold’s bridles, often with brutal spikes in the mouth, and iron collars known as jougs. These instruments of torture and public shaming were used mostly on women – branks were designed explicitly to silence, violently imprisoning and lacerating the tongue. I have been sitting with these objects in the archives. Feeling their weight, drawing them, making prints of them – taking in the full horror of their brutality.
My engagement with these objects feels personal. One of the few jougs still remaining in situ in Scotland is attached to a wall in the centre of the village where I grew up, in Kilmaurs, East Ayrshire. As a child, this iron collar was ever-present, a foreboding part of the village landscape – a warning of what happens to the unruly. Encountering jougs again within the museum collection has brought those early memories into dialogue with a broader history of gendered violence, silencing and control. Historical record surrounding their use is fragmentary, in part because they were often enforced through village discipline rather than formal trials. What documentation does exist shows these punishments were used overwhelmingly on women, particularly those deemed troublesome, outspoken or disruptive. One of the last documented uses of the Kilmaurs jougs is as recently as 1820 – long after the witch trials ended in Scotland.
This work sits within, and grows out of, my wider artistic practice over the past decade, which has focused on feminist economics — particularly the intersections of paid and unpaid labour, care, health – examining whose work, lives and ways of being are made visible or invisible under capitalism. Silvia Federici’s writing has been central to shaping my thinking. She frames the witch trials as part of a longer economic and political project tied to the rise of capitalism, through the destruction of autonomous women’s collectives and the dismantling of women-led systems of care and resource-sharing.
Federici’s work shows the persecution of women as witches as integral to the development of capitalism and concurrent with the transatlantic slave trade: means of disciplining and enslaving bodies and enclosing both land and labour for extraction and profit. In pre-witch-trial medieval Europe, she describes women living within collective, community-based systems of care, healing and shared labour. These forms of life represented a profound threat to feudal and emerging capitalist structures, and witch-hunting functioned as a tool to eradicate them.
I am applying a queer lens to Federici’s work – looking at evidence brought against queer women accused both of witchcraft and of “counterfeiting the office of husband” – women who were considered a a threat to male power both economically and sexually. Raiding of queer women’s homes in Scotland provided so-called evidence of witchcraft including objects described by the prosecutors as a “prosthetic phallus” or “ane piece of clay formed be hir to the liknes of a mans priwie member”.
This places the witch trials not only as the beginnings of capitalist accumulation, but at the beginnings of deeply homophobic and transphobic beliefs designed to maintain a social order of gender binary in which men owned and controlled women and territory.
Thinking about the idea of Domestic Bliss: what did Domestic Bliss look like to medieval women before their domestic space was so brutally violated, raided and torn apart? and how might we radically re-organise our domestic spaces now? From historical persecution to the present-day erosion of women-led spaces and underfunding of feminist and queer collectives, it feels clear that the intention is still to shut us down.
For the final part of my R&D at GoMA, I am extending an inviting to participate in collective actions and discussions, gathering to read, draw, scream, make, talk:
The Un/Nature reading group visited the GoMA studio last weekend to discuss some of Silvia Federici’s writing alongside an interview with artists Kerr & Malley.
Hold Your Tongue — a collective drawing workshop working with witches’ branks in the museum archives.
Scream in Domestic Bliss – a collective scream recorded in the gallery during Women’s History Month- a space that so often asks for quiet.
Counterfeiting the Office of Husband – a clay workshop responding directly to witch trial records in which objects seized from queer women’s homes described as “prosthetic phalluses” were used as evidence against them. For this workshop, alongside a discussion on these records, I am inviting women and people of other marginalised genders to work together in clay to collectively replicate contemporary women’s sex toys – in an act of joyous reclamation.
If women and queer collectives once posed a threat to authority simply by organising care, intimacy and survival outside patriarchal control, then they likely still do. Maintaining our queer joy is radical resistance.