Christine Borland

Christine Borland says she is desperate "to try to understand the complex historical and political situation we are a part of, to think about the really big questions" through her work, though she admits to being unable to provide any of the big answers.

She believes it is important to recognise that people are de-personalised by being "institutionalised or compartmentalised by institutions surrounding the body - health, medicine, birth and death" and she wants her work to be part of a movement to re-personalise them.

Asian, female, 5' 2"

Her work at the Tate Gallery's Turner Exhibition includes From Life, a work charting her forensic reconstruction of a 'missing person' - "an Asian female, 5' 2", aged 25 who had at least one advanced pregnancy" - after starting with just the skeleton. It culminates with a bronze cast of the woman's head.

Another of Borland's techniques involves placing skeletons on glass shelves and dusting them with white powder before removing the bones. The result is an "absence" rather than a "presence" with the dust representing the ephemeral nature of life - "From dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Genesis).

Angela Bulloch

"I am interested in how things evolve, or shift their meaning when you move them into various different contexts," says Angela Bulloch, "I like the apparent contradiction of defining something which is always subject to change."

One of her key interests is how the viewer can interact with a work of art and she has worked with drawing machines since the early 1990s.

Betaville

One such work is Betaville. It draws a vertical line unless someone sits on the bench in front of it, when the line will become horizontal - sitting and standing alternately results in a diagonal.

Other "interactive" works have included chairs which say different words when sat upon and a workbench which leaps into action in the viewer's presence.

Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker is probably best known for The Maybe - which involved actress Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case for seven days while Parker surrounded her with historical curiosities such as Queen Victoria's stocking or Wesley's spurs.

She describes herself as being "concerned with ambivalence, with opposites... things disintegrating and coming back together...with killing things off, as if they had existed in cartoon comics, and then resurrecting them."

Struck by lightning

One of her pieces being exhibited at the Tate is fragments of a Baptist church in Texas which was hit by lightning. The pieces of charred wood hang from the gallery ceiling, arranged to look like they are just exploding.

She created a similar work, Cold Dark Matter, by getting the Army to blow up a garden shed filled with everyday items and then suspending the debris around a single lightbulb.

Gillian Wearing

Unlike the other candidates, Gillian Wearing is more interested in live people than dead ones or dead matter. She says that her formative influences were the 1970s fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as The Family.

60 Minutes of Silence

Wearing uses real people, usually from where she lives in south east London, to create her art. One such example is 60 Minutes Silence, which at first sight is a lifesize photo of 26 police officers.

Eventually, the viewer realises that the work is a video - the officers are trying to remain still and quiet for the full hour but the strain gradually builds and they shuffle and flex.

The Daily Telegraph's Richard Dorment describes how one officer succeeded in remaining near-motionless the whole time until told that time was up. He then "lets out a yelp of relief that you can hear all over the gallery. The moment is like a dam bursting. His final, cathartic, joyful cry is one of the great moments in the history of recent British art."

The BBC gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Tate Gallery in producing this page - in particular the use of material from its book, The Turner Prize, by Kate Button.
 

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