Printmaker Ciara Phillips among the 2014 Turner Prize nominees

Her piece, Things Shared 2014, is centered on a huge three-dimensional OK text sculpture, which is surrounded by screen-prints placed directly onto the gallery walls.

Canadian-born artist Phillips was nominated for the Turner Prize 2014 for her Workshop exhibition at The Showroom in London last year – another “OK” based work, featuring screen-prints bearing the words “NO” and “OK”, configured into different words and arrangments.

Her current Turner Prize show at the Tate Britain borrows heavily from The Showroom work, taking elements of last year’s installation in its form – larger scale cotton pieces, screen-printed multiples and a print workshop space. According to Tate Britain, this collaborative element is a common theme in all Phillips’ work, and gave the show its title.

Interestingly, Phillips is the only artist in this year’s shortlist whose piece doesn’t involve any video elements.

The current favourite to scoop the 2014 prize, Duncan Campbell, is showing a video work that uses a mixture of archive footage and new material featuring a dance piece choreographed by Michael Clark.  The piece, entitled It for Others 2013, acts as a response to Statues Also Die – a 1953 film by Alan Resnais and Chris Marker,  the star of a fantastic recent Whitechapel Gallery retrospective.

Alongside this work, Campbell is also presenting Sigmar 2008, a film inspired by “his interest in but scant personal knowledge” of the work of Sigmar Polke – a nice move for the Tate, which is soon to open a show devoted to the German artist at its Tate Modern space.

James Richards has also looked directly within the art world for inspiration for his piece Untitled Merchandise (Lovers and Dealers) 2007, a work made up of souvenir blankets ordinarily used to show members of the US military covered in images of “lovers and art dealers” close to artist Keith Haring.

His main piece, and the one he has been nominated for however, is Rosebud 2013 – a film collage of images from Tokyo library books that the artist has deliberately “censored”, mixed with distorted images created using an underwater camera and disorientating sound pieces.

Finally, alongside the video work Finding Chopin: Dans l¹Essex 2014, Tris Vonna-Michell presents an installation piece, Postscript II (Berlin) 2014. The work is shown with a slide projector, with images showing a narrative based on stories from the artist’s mother’s childhood in post-war Germany.

The Turner Prize award is £40,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £5,000 each for the other shortlisted artists. The winner will be announced live on Channel 4 by British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor on 1 December. 

The Turner Prize 2014 Exhibition runs from
30 September 2014 ­ 4 January 2015  at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG