This year, the Turner Prize show makes a lot of sense. This makes a change from the more usual cobbled-together feel, with four artists who have little in common bar their nomination gathered so that the public can assess them in advance of the judging panel’s decision.

The tie that binds Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes is a common interest in making art about art, and the way it is made. They all do this in very different ways, but the underlying theme of artists exploring, researching and revising the work of other artists, the art form in which they work, or, in Wilkes’s case, her own life and practice, makes this feel less like a parade of artists lining up for a cash prize, more like a group show, and a satisfying one at that.

Of the four, Macuga makes the most explicit art about art. Known for quoting from other artists, and for her interest in the way in which art is collected, curated, archived and exhibited, Macuga’s focus here is on two couples, personal and professional. She is showing a trio of sculptures that recreate designs by Lilly Reich, first seen in the German Pavilion of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. These cool, stand-offish industrial structures in smoked glass and steel must have packed more of a punch when Macuga exhibited them earlier this year in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a building designed by Reich’s partner, Mies van der Rohe, but her bid to reassess Reich still stands, thanks to the pieces’ rather pointed titles, Haus der Frau and Deutches Volk - Deutches Arbeit. Macuga’s new pieces for this show are collaged combinations of photographic prints by British modernist Paul Nash, paper cutouts by his partner Eileen Agar, and other ephemera, all culled from the Tate’s own archives.

A snap of Agar in a swimming costume is layered over a Nash photograph of some tree trunks, and a Nash snap of a cliff top is enhanced with an anatomical drawing of a hand pointing down from the heavens from Agar’s collection - posthumous collaborations enforced by Macuga that are oddly convincing, suggesting an alternate history of a particular corner of British art history.

Mark Leckey mines the past, too, but his tactics are more personal, more subjective. His Cinema-in-the-Round is a film of a lecture Leckey has been giving, and revising, for the past two years, a roving, often funny look at the artworks and films that Leckey is drawn to, and the relationship between objects and images, quoting Marx one minute and Homer Simpson the next. Made in ‘Eaven trains a camera on Jeff Koons’s highly-polished steel sculpture Rabbit, which reflects a mirror on the wall of Leckey’s studio, which in turn reflects the materials he gathered while researching the work. It’s a dizzyingly self-reflexive trick, at once commenting on the vacuous sheen of Koons’s piece, and Leckey’s attraction to it.

Self-reflexivity is the cornerstone of Runa Islam’s film works. Cinematography sees a motion-controlled camera slowly panning around the workshop of motion-control expert Harry Harrison, with a soundtrack made up of the clicks and whirrs of the camera apparatus. You’d never guess, but the camera is tracing out the letters of the word “cinematography”. For First Day of Spring, Islam returned to her native Bangladesh, and paid rickshaw drivers to rest, working as actors playing themselves. Again, the camera pans slowly, exchanging an establishing shot for close-ups on the drivers’ faces, but the sudden, unscripted interruption of a passer-by, who looks straight into the camera, reminds us that this is as much a film about documentary film-making as it is a documentary. If all that sounds too clever by half, Islam’s work is saved by being simply beautiful, and by its presentation in carefully-designed, dimly-lit screening rooms - watching them, enjoying the images presented, is enough, with the theoretical underpinnings of each film the cherry on the cake.

After these three, Cathy Wilkes comes as something of a relief. Her work is immediate, affecting and deeply personal. Rather than mining some obscure corner of art history, Wilkes looks to her own life, assembling large-scale installations from everyday elements. Set on top of two supermarket checkout units, there are bowls full of dried soup. On the floor, empty jars with batteries placed inside them. There’s a shop mannequin perched on a toilet and festooned with rusty horseshoes, a tea cup and other detritus. A second mannequin is trapped inside a birdcage and draped in sliced up tea-towels. In part a diary of domestic life, in part a feminist critique expressed in juxtapositions with a surrealist bent, Wilkes’s work works because it is, first and foremost, sculptural. Those dirty bowls are aligned with perfect precision, a pair of jam jars mirror each other, the placement of the squat heaps of roof tiles, each painted with a cross motif, fizzes with tension. And, when that cross motif reappears, this time made of spoons and wadding, it comes, inexplicably, as a genuine shock. There is, too, something deeply satisfying in the way that Wilkes borrows from her own work, slowly developing a grammar of allied objects over many years - there’s a pushchair here that offers a reminder of a 2004 installation in a disused Glasgow hairdresser’s, the tiny whelk shells that peppered a recent show at the Modern Institute have been replaced here by flower petals, the heart motif of a flat, rubbery sculpture is rendered in pink, not yellow as it has been in the past. These subtle repetitions, revisions and removals are, admittedly, only apparent to viewers familiar with Wilkes’s past work, but there’s no doubt that fresh eyes would see that Wilkes has thought deeply about the objects she gathers together, and the relationships between them, even if the reasons behind the choices she makes remain a mystery.

So, who will win? Mark Leckey has been hotly tipped since the shortlist was announced, but he’s not a dead cert like Mark Wallinger, who took the prize last year. There’s no obvious stand-out, either, and none of the artists look out of their depth. Were it up to me, I’d have a hard time choosing between Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes. Both have developed complex, layered and weighty ways of working, but neither of them, unlike Leckey and Macuga, has slipped over the line into making rather dry, academic work. The result is film and sculpture that makes you think, and think hard, but, more than that, Islam and Wilkes make the sort of stuff that sticks in the mind for reasons it is impossible to explain away in a curatorial note, operating, for all its sophistication, at a gut level, appealing to the viewers’ eyes and instincts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Islam and Wilkes are better artists than their peers here, but it does make it possible to fall in love with their work, rather than admiring its wit, rigour and sophistication.

The Turner Prize 2008 is at Tate Britain, London, until January 18.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 3rd October , 2008.

For some artists a commission to craft Christmas lights might be taken as an opportunity to have a bit of fun, adding a dose of kitsch to their catalogue raisonné, or attempting an unsubtly subversive satire of the commercially-driven season.

Not so Anya Gallaccio. When the Paisley-born Turner Prize nominee was asked to provide festive lighting for The Hayward gallery, she took to the project like any other show or commission, coming up with an installation that fits in with her past practice, and rests on themes that have run through her work since she rose to fame in the late 90s alongside the Young British Artists launched at the now-infamous Freeze exhibition curated by Damien Hirst.

‘I did struggle,’ Gallaccio admits, ‘And it was quite hard to come up with something that took the same approach as I would for any project. The thing that took a long time to get over was the idea that Christmas lights are usually very graphic - a snowman, a star, a flower - and I didn’t want to make images like that. I ended up trying to think more about the process, about light itself and what you can do with it, and about colour.’

The result, a set of lights at the South Bank switched on last night by model-cum-author Sophie Dahl, consists of hundreds of coloured lightbulbs festooned on two sides of the Thames-side building.

‘I’ve made a big grid of green lights on the right hand side of the building,’ Gallaccio explains, ‘We hand-dipped about a thousand different light bulbs in different shades of green, using French enamel varnish, to make a sort of colour field. Then, on the other side of the building, there’s a smaller version made up of about 900 red bulbs.’

Aside from their Christmassy connotations, those colours are familiar from one of Gallaccio’s best known installations, Red on Green, which saw ten thousand rose heads laid out on a bed of their stalks, and left to slowly rot away. Lightbulbs do not, of course, decay, but Gallaccio has come up with novel way of incorporating her long-standing interest in transformations over time.

‘Each bulb in the piece has a computer chip,’ she says, ‘so that I can have each one to turn on and off when I want it to, and we’ve programmed the festoons of lights with Christmas carols and songs - Frosty The Snowman, White Christmas, that sort of thing - in Morse code. You can’t read the Morse code, but I needed a way of determining how the lights would come on and off without involving an image. If you think back to the roses, there were ten thousand flowers, all a similar red, but there was an optic effect down to the nature of the pigment in the blooms which changed as they aged. For this piece, I decided to hand-dip the bulbs in colours that range from yellowy-green to very dark shade, so there’s this slightly intuitive, organic element to it.’

Another key aspect of Gallaccio’s practice is her reluctance to show her hand, so to speak, preferring impermanent installations that are left to their own devices, from rotting flower heads to chocolate smeared on gallery walls or the vast block of ice she left to melt away in a disused Wapping pumping station. More recently, the artist has reclaimed the rather naff art of macramé, laboriously knotting great swathes of netting that are then hung and draped to undermined their rigid grid-like structure.

Again, Gallaccio’s festive lights have been made with her wider practice in mind, taking advantage of The Hayward’s plans for their annual lightshow. ‘The idea of the programme is that it will become an accumulative project,’ she says, ‘This year, they’re installing the lights David Batchelor made last year again, and next year there’ll be somebody else and my lights will go up again - after a while the building will end up looking like a family Christmas tree, with a great jumble of stuff built up over the years!’

‘So, I’ve left open lots of possibilities to do different things with the piece. Next year, the bulbs could be placed more closely together, which would make the colours more intense, or it could be hung in a completely different formation. I’m looking forward to seeing what different things those colours do in different places and on different scales around the South Bank in the coming years.’

Gallaccio’s contribution to London’s seasonal cityscape is not alone: over at Tate Britain, Fiona Banner has installed a 30-foot Nordic tree, and decorated it with models of the world’s fighter aircraft shorn of their national markings, ironically dubbing the tree Peace On Earth. With The Hayward’s commitment to future lighting projects, this looks like the start of a trend, one that other cities would do well to follow, tempering those gaudy municipal rigs with contributions from artists. There’s even an obvious slogan: ‘Tis the season to be arty.

This interview was first published in The Herald in December, 2007.