LIAM GILLICK

Born in Aylesbury, Bucks, in 1964, Liam Gillick studied art at Hertfordshire College of Art and Goldsmiths College, London. His work explores the commercial, political and social structures that shape our existence.

Earlier this year, Gillick literally reinscribed a figure of commerce and popular culture in his installation for Tate Britain, Annlee You Proposes. Annlee is a Japanese computer-animation figure originally intended as a character for Manga - Japanese adult comics - or as a marketing tool. As such she is a symbol of the corporate culture machine, which creates characters and narratives within the sphere of commerce. The French artists Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the copyright to Annlee for use in their art, a use they later offered to Gillick.

In Annlee You Proposes, Gillick combines video with sculpture that is also furniture - an example of his interest in a thematic overlapping between media. His sculptural work often includes passages of text, blurring the line between pure form and textual discourse. This collaboration of forms reflects Gillick's frequent collaboration with other artists, designers, writers or architects, such as with Par reno and Huyghe on the Annlee project.

Gillick's recent projects also include a solo exhibition this year at the Whitechapel Art Galler y, London. In 2001, he curated 'Dedalic Convention' for MAK, Vienna and Kunstverein Salzburg. Liam Gillick lives and works between London and New York, and is represented by the Corvi-Mora Gallery, London.

FIONA BANNER

Fiona Banner was born in Liverpool in 1966. After studying at Kingston Polytechnic, she went on to earn an MA at Goldsmiths College in 1993. The following year, she held her first solo exhibition at City Racing in London, and was included in an ICA group show, 'Institute of Cultural Anxiety'.

Banner could be described as a linguist - not in the traditional sense, to be sure, but in the sense that her work is an analysis of the textual landscape in all its forms. She deconstructs and reinterprets the function of language to the individual and to society. The raw material for her work ranges from film scripts to punctuation: in the desert (1994-5), Banner retells the plot of Lawrence of Arabia, using text covering a surface the size of a movie screen, engaging the nature of audience in communication. Four years later, she placed a series of polystyrene full stops across a gallery floor, forcing a physical interaction with semantic forms.

This year, Banner mounted two major solo exhibitions under the collective title 'Your Plinth is My Lap'. At the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Aachen, Germany, she installed large stainless-steel full stops in the museum grounds, while at Dundee Contemporary Arts she unveiled new large graphite drawings as well as extending other graphic, sculptural and sound-based works, and pursuing film sources.

Banner has had solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery (2001) and the Frith Street Gallery, London (1999, 1997). She lives and works in London, and is represented by the Frith Street Gallery.

CATHERINE YASS

Catherine Yass was born in London in 1966. She studied at the Slade School of Art and completed her MA at Goldsmiths College in 1990. While at college, she accidentally came upon the photographic technique that is her trademark today: identical photographic images, one of them a negative, are layered, resulting in unearthly, glowing colour combinations. Blues, especially, come across as a psychedelic blend of clear sky and chemical compound. The pieces are printed on Ilfochrome transparencies and placed in lightboxes, heightening the effect of the colouration.

Many of Yass's works address the psychology of space. Her 1999 work Capsule examines Japanese dormitory cubicles, stacked on top of each other as if conceived in science fiction. The cubicles are empty, but the strange colours suggest a psychic energy within the confined space. In contrast to the constraint of these cubicle spaces, Yass's 2002 film and transparency work Descent is filmed from a crane in Canary Wharf. The dimensions of the scene are broader, but it remains devoid of human involvement, allowing the 'psychoanalysis' of the landscape itself.

Yass's exhibition history includes shows such as 'Steel' at Ffoto Gallery, Cardiff (1996), and 'Invisible Cities', Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo (1998). The New Galler y at Walsall commissioned Yass to create a video work for its opening in 2000, and she represented Britain at the Tenth Indian Triennial in Mumbai last year.

She is represented by the Asprey Jacques Gallery, London.

KEITH TYSON

Born in Ulverston, Cumbria, in 1969, Tyson took Mechanical Engineering Craft Studies at Barrow-in-Furness College of Engineering, studied art at Carlisle College of Art and completed his MA in Alternative Practice at the University of Brighton in 1993. He held his first solo exhibition, 'From the Artmachine', at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 1995 - the 'Artmachine', when given raw data, generates artistic proposals, separating the personal artist from the work.

Tyson's work emerges from the space where science and art collide - his 2002 solo exhibition at the South London Gallery bore the title 'Supercollider'. The artworks reflect a conglomeration of modern information, manipulated to bring new perspectives to human life in a flood of data. Tyson's drawings combine scientific-style texts with shapes and lines that are both diagrammatic and abstract. His sculptural work often takes on the form of actual scientific constructions, such as in A Tiny Bubble of Complexity (2001), which consists of a two-metre-wide sphere inside which heating and cooling elements alter the colour of its heat-sensitive surface.

Tyson won the ICA's Arts and Innovation Award for his contribution to 'Pandemonium' at the ICA, London, in 1996. He is represented by the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.

Works by the shortlisted artists will be exhibited at Tate Britain from 30 October to 5 January. The winner will be announced on 8 December live on Channel 4, sponsor of the Turner Prize.

Find out more about the Turner Prize 2002, see the works now on show at Tate Britain and book tickets online. Judge for yourself who should win this year's Prize in the online discussion forums.