Emerging Visual Artist Residency 2025 awarded to Olivia Priya Foster

 

 

 

We’re delighted to announce that Olivia Priya Foster has been awarded the 2025 Emerging Visual Artist Residency 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).

In response to winning the award, Olivia said: “My work is a direct response to rurality, as a manifestation of my biography. Cove Park can facilitate my access to rural land and provide a productive and supportive environment for research and development of new work to take place. Having time to devote to my practice without the distractions of life in Glasgow, will give me a rare opportunity for time and head space to focus on my proposed project. As I am in the early stages in my career I believe this with be a pivotal moment for me as an artist and will truly provide a space for new ideas to develop in my field of research. Having the opportunity to work in a landscape within my site of interest, will provide an environment for my research and my studio practice to be both facilitated and nurtured.”

 

 

 

 

 

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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