They are aggressively confrontational and almost dare the spectator not to enter into the debate regarding conventional stereotypes” – Dr Linda Mead of Birkbeck College, London.What she says: “The history of art has been dominated by men, living in ivory towers, seeing women as sexual objects … I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness.”And: “I’m painting these kinds of figures because I think it’s important to challenge trad- itional representations of the female nude. In her subsequent paintings, Saville depicted bodies as if they had been prepared for the scalpel.Hard graft: Saville didn’t get a state grant and had to pay her own way at Glasgow. At one stage, she was rising at 6.30am to work in a stockbroker’s office, heading on to art school later in the day.First came to notice: in 1992 – one of her paintings was featured on the cover of the Times’s Saturday magazine.

Charles Saatchi saw it, and then bought her first show in its entirety. He commissioned another year’s worth of work from her, and the resulting 11 pictures appeared in YBA III”, in January 1994. They aroused almost as much interest as Hirst’s shark had done back in 1992.Best-known work: Plan, a full-frontal, full-length (longer, in fact, it measures 9′x7′) portrait of a woman whose flesh has been plotted with routes for the surgeon’s knife (below). It won the Lord Provost’s Art Prize at Glasgow in 1995, and will be seen again in “Sensation”.What the critics say: “Saville creates disobedient images that deliberately make you question your view of women. there was a lot more naivity then.” Not that her requests are always innocent: “I’ve been going up to women in flowered dresses, and asking them for their rendition of ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ … they all look like the Stepford Wives.”Dealer: Maureen Paley, who runs Interim Art in Hackney.What next? The Turner Prize – she’s up against Angela Bulloch, Cornelia Parker and Christine Borland. And her work will be shown in Sydney in October, in “Picture Britannica: Art from Britain”.JENNY SAVILLEBorn: Cambridge, 1970.Educated: Glasgow School of Art.What she does: Fat is a Feminist Issue – the painting.

Saville famously paints the female nude in its fullest dimensions: flesh drips and seeps all over the canvas. Her pictures could be grotesque, they’re certainly Lucian Freudian (though his women are more often scrawny), yet they’re extremely popular.How does she do her research? Her work became more political after she spent a year as an exchange student in Cincinatti, on a programme sponsored by the art patrons Susan Kasen and Robert Summer, where she joined women’s studies groups and sat in on plastic-surgery operations. Wearing’s dwarf was a professional actor who had been in Disney movies, which seems rather fitting.What a critic said: “Only the last confessor in the film seemed really disturbed and should possibly have been in hospital” – Matthew Collings, Guardian.What she says: [accused of being merely a sophisticated Jeremy Beadle] “The direction I’ve come from is 1970s fly-on-the-wall documentaries … Confessions helped her to a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize. To find confessors she put ads in Time Out.Who confessed? “I do feel anxious about my mother and I’d love to kill her very much,” said a naked dwarf lying in a bath.Why did she use a dwarf? Wearing maintains the boy’s confession of his hatred for his mother’s lesbian lover was so strange it had to be recounted in a surreal manner. And a great deal less, curiously, as it’s somewhat harder to get to from London, than they are willing to pay in just-commutable Seaview across the water on the Isle of Wight.According to Charles Smallman, of local estate agents Christie Matthews, the attraction of “relatively picturesque and unspoilt Victorian charm” is such that “there are people queuing to pay pounds 500,000 for any house here which is on the water’s edge or has access to the beach.”Of the properties his firm sells in the village, he reckons 95 per cent go to prospective second-homers who are predominantly London-based.Although at the bottom end of the scale you can still get a small converted flat without glimpse of Solent for as little as pounds 40,000, and although the lower and middle ranges the market remain disappointing according to some, Mr Smallman says that in the last year, prices have stabilised and started to improve.But whereas in nearby Ryde – more easily commutable – prices have remained perhaps 30 per cent lower because of limitations on resident income, those in Seaview have – in spite of earlier local difficulties experienced by semi-resident “names” at Lloyd’s – been generally cushioned by what he calls the “vast mainland salaries” of many of its property owners, existing or aspiring.

Other videos feature clothed people masturbating, masked people confessing and Wearing dancing in a shopping precinct. Their stories were then “told” by adult actors in staged scenarios (below) – literally putting young words in old mouths, to suggest that adult stoicism is undermined by the seething emotions felt in childhood. Wearing photographed people on the street holding a sheet of paper on which they wrote what they were thinking. The piece was called Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants them to say.What does she do now? Videos, mainly about adolescent angst. For 10:16, she taped adolescents speaking about whatever they wanted. “It is all of these things,” says Whiteread, who is “very angry”.GILLIAN WEARINGBorn: Birmingham, 1963.Educated: BTech at Chelsea School of Art (1985-87); BA at Goldsmiths’ (1987-90).First came to notice: “New Contemporaries”, 1992. Her association in the public mind with Hirst et al is more to do with being in the same shows than dining at Quo Vadis.