An unusual choice for a Turner Prize nominee, the still life painter has been shortlisted for her exhibition at the Cabinet Gallery in London. A 34-year-old Royal College of Art graduate, she chooses traditional subjects like flowers, country landscapes and the human body, but offers a new take on the conventional.

Known for exploring small themes over a number of paintings, Gillian Campbell has been compared to the 20th century British painters Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. Fleur d’Huile is one of a series of paintings featuring a withering bunch of flowers in a plastic mineral water bottle. Black Square, which was displayed in Tate Britain’s Days Like These exhibition, appears to be plain black square on a canvas. However, on closer analysis, it turns out to be a detailed forest scene, created by applying different thicknesses of paint with slight variations in colour.

Based in London, the artist is the first painter in five years to be nominated for the £25,000 prize. She has exhibited in London, New York, Berlin and Milan.

Darren Almond

The 34-year-old Wigan-born artist has been shortlisted for his exhibition at the K21 gallery in Düsseldorf. He is best known for Terminus, an installation of bus shelters from outside Auschwitz (he took the originals in exchange for replacements.)

His work focuses on history and the passage of time, a specialism that he credits to a youth spent as a timetable-studying train-spotter.

Darren Almond first came to the art world’s attention in 1995, when he used a big screen in a London shop to display live footage of his own empty studio - he called the creation A Real Time piece. Another notable work is If I Had You, a four-screen video installation in which his grandmother talks about the past.

The artist trained at Winchester School of Art. He uses a variety of photography, film, sculpture and installation and has had work exhibited in London, New York and Zurich.

Jim Lambie

An artist by day, a DJ by night, Lambie, 41, is best known for a series of ZOBOP floor pieces – exhibits that visitors can walk over – made using lines of brightly coloured tape, and intended to be an exploration of space. His involvement in the European clubbing scene is the inspiration for much of his colourful, psychedelic work.

One of the generation of successful artists emerging from the Glasgow School of Art, he transforms everyday objects and places using materials like glitter, bags and buttons.

Other creations include She’s Lost Control, an installation of eleven different speakers, mounted on a wall, and covered in rainbow-coloured T-shirts, and Psychedelic Soul Stick, a sculpture made from discarded items like cigarette packets.

Simon Starling

Simon Starling takes existing objects and transforms them, usually using recycled materials. For Made-Ready, he constructed a bicycle using the aluminium parts from a designer chair. He calls his art as ‘associative collage’,

Continuing with the cycling theme, last year Starling rode a bicycle that he had modified to run on two hydrogen fuel cells across Europe’s only desert, the Tarbernas in Andalusia. The 38-year-old artist, who is passionate about the environment, now displays the bike alongside his watercolour painting of a cactus in the desert, which is being damaged by global warming. The source of water for the watercolour was the only waste from the bike’s hydrogen cells – just 600mls of water.

Simon Starling trained at the Glasgow School of Art and divides his time between Glasgow and Berlin.