Olivia Priya Foster reports on the Emerging Visual Artist Residency 2025

 

 

 

We were delighted to have Olivia Priya Foster as our 2025 Emerging Visual Artist at Cove Park. This early-career residency enables an emerging visual artist based in Scotland to develop new work at an important point in their career. During the residency, the artist is part of a changing community of national and international artists specialising in a wide variety of art forms.

Olivia is a Glasgow-based interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on rurality, specifically in Argyll, where she grew up on a farm. Foster explores her dual cultural identity and the intersections of South Asian and Scottish heritage. Often working with sculpture, performance, moving image and sound. Foster’s practice deals with themes of displacement, queer rurality, sustainability, land, energy, migration and diaspora within the context of Scottish landscapes. Olivia graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2024, receiving the Chairman’s Medial for ‘best in school’ for fine art and was nominated by the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), as a ‘New Contemporary.’ She was also nominated as a Visual Art Scotland (VAS) ‘shortlisted artist’ and has since won the RSA art prize + MacLaine Watters Medal and the Skinny’s prize. Some of her selected group exhibitions include the Royal Glasgow Institute, (RGI) ‘Exhibit: A’ (2022), Transmission, ‘Gridlock’ (2022), The Pipe Factory, ‘Speak’ (2022), UCL Mullard Space, ‘Edge of Darkness’ (2023), Strange Field at French St, ‘Da Leth’ (2023) New Glasgow Society, ‘Ma Bit’ (2023), the CCA, ‘Glasgow International opening Party’ (2024), the Royal Scottish Academy, ‘New contemporaries’ (2025).

Olivia had this to say about her time at Cove Park: ‘The residency provided a space where I could function as a full-time artist in my area of interest and research. I have never before had this type of opportunity and it enabled me to cultivate a full-time, functioning practice, allowing me to to structure my days depending on what I needed to make at the time. This helped me develop discipline and productivity within my work.

I will remember my time at Cove Park for the rest of my career. It was a very pivotal moment for me and really allowed me to take the next step in my professional development. I made strong and valuable relationships with both artists, writers and curators. I believe these will last a very long time and continue to influence and guide me throughout my career. Cove Park provided a space for my practice to be prioritised and nurtured, allowing me to pave the way for my future work by providing me with a space to collect an extensive archive of moving image and audio work to develop further this year and beyond.

Cove Park was such an amazing place to be. I can’t recommend it enough to anyone at any stage of their career. I found it to be very welcoming and nurturing. I also had the opportunity to meet a range of really inspiring people and learned so much about my own practice and others’. The site was the perfect place to develop work and find focus and inspiration. It was both exciting and calming. Coming from Argyll, I really appreciate a place that cultivates and facilitates creative practice and research in such a unique part of the world. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to spend time here. iI has shaped me as an artist.

 

 

 

2024 Residency:

The 2024 Residency was awarded to Saturn Akin. Saturn is a Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, adornment making, 3D, and photography. Their art practice revolves around the conjuration of their own identity (NB/Trans) and is driven by the creation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of adornments, 3D objects and still-lifes. Through this intricate and generative process, Saturn Akin explores themes of transness, body signal technology, and mutualism/mutability within a Queer Ecological framework. Narration plays pivotal roles in Saturn Akin’s (3D) object-making process. Saturn Akin draws inspiration from renowned black and non-black feminist and transgender science-fiction authors like Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, and Bogi Takács. The incorporation of non-human life forms in their objects and adornments underscores the concept of mutualism and envisions a Queer future rooted in transspecies relationships.

Whether drawing inspiration from technology or non-human entities, each object acts as an amulet.; an amulet holds the ability of transmutation and explores the notion of ‘becoming with — ’. The usage of 3D (software, virtual, or printed) allows Saturn Akin to incorporate non-human referents without the need for physical encounters or a traditional “cabinet of curiosity”. This conceptual (technological) distancing permits them to “keep things alive by rejecting mastery or dominance”.

Saturn had this to say about their residency experience at Cove Park:

‘Cove Park was an embodied experience I will remember all my life. Surrounded by nature, creative spaces, and a supportive community, I had the time and freedom to explore long-awaited, paused, and challenging ideas.

 More than just a retreat, Cove Park encourages reflection on sustainability—both in terms of environmental impact and personal ecology. It prompts fundamental reflection: What kind of artist do you want to be? How can you sustain your practice—not just financially, but in a way that protects your energy, integrates rest, and fosters meaningful connection? Cove Park feels like a suspended “what if,” a space where you are both deeply connected to the world and free to fully realise yourself.’

 

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