We are delighted to announce our 2026 PLATFORM Early Career Artists, Olivia Priya Foster and Moira Salt. 2026 marks the first year of the newly formed PLATFORM Award, re-developed to respond to the lack of long-term creative development opportunities available to artists in Scotland, providing artists with the freedom and security to explore over an 18-month period. Both artists will take part in a sharing event during EAF26, and showcase new work in August 2027, as part of EAF27.
Olivia Priya Foster
Olivia Priya Foster (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based between Glasgow and Argyll.
Foster’s practice explores rurality in Scotland through the lens of their South Asian and Scottish heritage. Drawing on their upbringing on a farm on Scotland’s west coast, Foster navigates questions of cultural identity, belonging, and place, engaging both personal and collective narratives of land as sites of memory and power. They examine themes of displacement, Queer rurality, sustainability, land, and diaspora. Through material process and embodied experience, Foster creates dialogues between environment and identity, challenging dominant representations of Scotland while foregrounding its layered and politicised realities.
Moira Salt
Moira Salt (she/her) is a trans-disciplinary artist, working fluidly across film, sound, performance, textiles, and text.
Salt chases diasporic belonging and myths of her ancestry through water, land, and body. She tries to access stories that persist in submerged realities, obscured by layers of history, sediment, murk and violence, drawing complex entanglements across time, where the human and non-human merge within contemporary politics, environmentalism, and spirituality. Her practice is grounded in a Black diasporic perspective shaped by the histories of the United States and their own grand-maternal ruptures.
The Selection Panel
Alongside the EAF Programme team (Kim McAleese, Eleanor Taylor, and Elle Haswell), artists were selected by Dr Maggie Matić. Matić is a curator, writer and researcher with a specialism in contemporary feminist, crip and queer visual culture. They are currently Director of Auto Italia, London, and have previously worked at Studio Voltaire, Somerset House Studios, Tate, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) and The University of Liverpool.
EAF Curator, Eleanor Taylor said: “It has been such a joy bringing back and reshaping PLATFORM for 2026. The award is such an important moment for early career artists in Scotland, and I’m beyond excited to announce Olivia Priya Foster and Moira Salt as the first recipients of the newly reformed 18-month award. The residency will provide them with the time and freedom to really dive into their work, to experiment and push boundaries. I can’t wait to see the ideas, risks, and conversations that will emerge — this kind of long-term creative freedom is exactly what makes art in Scotland so exciting right now.”