Catlin Art Prize: this year's finalists

Got a cat with an itch for lunar travel? Sarah Fortais could have the answer. This Central Saint Martins graduate creates spacesuits for animals as part of research ‘missions’ that have also involved sourcing moon rock samples for object handling sessions. The rocks are real, but don’t think about attempting a feline space launch – her materials list includes vacuum hoses, fishing wire, yogurt cups and newspaper.

Our verdict Fortais has stars in her eyes, but it’s too great a leap to see her as this year’s winner.

The endless peaks of repeated mountain ranges become stylishly sublime in this RCA graduate’s huge paintings. In case you’ve pegged Raitt as a brooding romantic in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich, though, notice the giant Magic Tree air freshener sculpture, coated in fragrant sap green paint, which is installed nearby.

Our verdict Fun and piney fresh. We rate Raitt very highly indeed.

This alumnus of Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, plays people like instruments. Attaching probes to their foreheads, cheeks and around their mouths, he manipulates his volunteers to soundtracks, which he also devises (and notes down as fluid abstract drawings). He’ll make a film for each day of the exhibition – inspired by superstition and astrological codes. 

Our verdict Could win if he pulls enough strings.

Mixing marble dust and wax, this RCA graduate makes sculptures that seem physically and emotionally to be sinking into the ground. This is figurative art in the mould of existentialists going back to Alberto Giacometti’s alienated stick figures but Ittah proves that, when done right, it can still pack a punch.

Our verdict Too trad to triumph.

Space occupies the imagination of Central Saint Martins graduate Lara Morrell. She’s currently working on a large-scale project to build a ‘Lunar Land Base’ on the roof of a car park opposite the HQ of the UK Border Agency – called ‘Lunar House’, appropriately enough, in Croydon. For this show, though, she’s tackling the ever-thorny issue of religious customs, showing photographs of headless ‘Wicker Man’-style figures woven from vines in her native Italy that represent Christ’s apostles.    

Our verdict Should attract some close disciples but we’re doubting Thomases.

As if balloon modelling didn’t already bring to mind terrifying images of sad clowns and sugar-saturated toddlers, the dark photorealist paintings of art duo and real life married couple (with kids) Mr & Mrs Philip Cath make its anthropomorphism appear truly twisted. Recent works by the Goldsmiths graduates depict blown-up condom-like drones (which they call ‘ambi-figures’) going about their daily chores in an atmosphere of Old Masterly gloom. Just as startling is the artists’ personal style – a kind of young Tories get-up which they flaunt in studiously old-guard ‘at home’ photographic portraits.

Our verdict Sure, they’re deliberately, decadently old-fashioned but it worked for Gilbert & George in the 1960s and could work here.

This Edinburgh graduate draws on his experience in healthcare and videogames to create an installation that bombards you with self-perpetuating self-portraits and an unwinnable videogame set against a backdrop of frenzied marketing. ‘A full-tilt barrage of self-indulgence, desperation and pathological self-exclusion,’ is how he describes it.

Our verdict Sounds like a documentary of our lives. If Reinmüller wins, we all win!