It’s that time of year again, when young arts graduates find themselves having to reveal to the outside world just what it is they’ve been doing all this time. Graduate shows are popping up at colleges all over the country and the art world is beginning to buzz with curiosity – who will the big collectors be buying? Who will spend the next 30 years struggling to make it, and who will be the Next Big Thing?

As well as the college exhibitions, more and more shows are cropping up where the leg-work is done for you, with hand-picked selections of young artists representing the brightest talent from around the country. Anticipation is the newest of these shows and promises to showcase 25 of London’s finest MA and BA students from 2005-06. It will certainly spark interest, with pieces ranging from an 8ft chandelier made from vacuum cleaner fluff by Jodie Carey to Michael Lisle-Taylor’s military uniforms transformed into straitjackets.

The daddy of these shows, though, is Free Range, at the Old Truman Brewery in East London, which has sifted through thousands of entries every year for the past seven years to choose the very shiniest of shiny bright young things in design, photography, art and mixed media from across the UK. This year, a rolling programme of more than 60 shows features more than 3,000 hopeful students. We’ve chosen five current or recent Free Rangers we think have what it takes to make it big.

Nadine Jarvis, product designer

There are two ways in which people usually react to Jarvis’s work. They are either touched by its poetry and humanity or they recoil in horror. “People think I’m really morbid and strange, but I’m not, I’m quite normal,” protests the sunny 24-year-old.

The easiest way to describe her pieces is “death objects”. Rest in Pieces and Bird Feeder are like the urns used to store the ashes of the dead, but eliminate the responsibility for when and how they are to be scattered. Rest in Pieces is a ceramic urn suspended outside on a perishable thread. When the thread disintegrates the urn falls to the ground. The ashes escape on the wind, leaving behind the memorial of the broken pot. It’s like the final breaking free of the soul. Bird Feeder is a hollow casing of bird food that releases the ash bit by bit as holes are pecked in it. “Part of my aim was to help the griever,” says Jarvis, “to prolong the death ceremony so you’ve got more time to grieve.”

Jarvis’s most polarising but, arguably, most poetic work is a beautiful wooden box containing 240 pencils. “I worked out that when you heat up ash to a high temperature it turns to graphite,” she explains. “You can make 240 pencils from someone of my body weight.” The product isn’t available because it’s an industrial process requiring a (brave) manufacturer, but the response has been astonishing. “People send me e-mails. An artist told me he would draw a picture of the person. One guy said he’d write a book about his life – I thought that was quite lovely.”

Aowen Jin, artist

She is a product of China’s one-child policy, married to a Scot and living in a Yorkshire village, so it’s not surprising that Jin’s work is concerned with identity. She came from China to study law at Durham University in 1997, feeling the full weight of parental expectation, she says. It was only after a near-death encounter with six bottles of red wine one New Year’s Eve that she realised she wanted to be an artist. “I was alone, I was really low and I thought, if I die here, nobody is going to know. This life sucks!” So she gave up law to study art.

It was the right decision. Last year Jin was commissioned by the UK China Cultural Association to present a piece of work to the Queen for her 80th birthday. The painting, called Two Left Feet, is an oddly erotic image of two legs emerging from a red fabric drape. It is stitched like a tapestry in an ancient Chinese style called Wan Zhen Xiu using thread ten times as thin as hair.

Jin’s heritage continues to inform her art. She is currently working on a film about young Asian girls – Chinese, Thai, Korean, Japanese – employed as prostitutes in London brothels. “They have loads of pressure from home, from family. Some of them are really lost, some just want to rebel. It’s fascinating.” She has some hair-raising tales, of posing as a madam with a hidden camera and of being robbed at gunpoint. “Everyone was shaking and I was like, yes! This is exactly what I need! Just don’t shoot me in the face!”

Carl Brorson, furniture designer

The moment a design student is cut adrift from college is usually one of blind panic at the prospect of finding a job in a near-saturated industry. In Brorson’s case, however, he was plunged in at the deep end in a different way, landing a job at the office of the architect David Adjaye as a furniture designer. Not bad for a kid two weeks out of college.

The work that secured Brorson’s design future also won him an important Vitra Award. Essentially, it’s a table with three wide legs in a flexible but tough material that can be upturned and used as a seat for three people. It’s really simple. Which is what Brorson likes.

“I work with a lot of boxes,” he says in his soft, Swedish accent, “a lot of modular systems, to create these generic, changeable environments, changeable pieces of furniture. It’s to do with putting some thought behind it and being a bit clever. But not too clever.” It doesn’t sound thrilling, I’ll grant you, and it doesn’t have the flash factor of something by Karim Rashid or Ron Arad, but it has massive commercial appeal and designers love it.

Steve Schofield, photographer

After spending three years in the company of students 20-odd years younger than himself, the 37-year-old Schofield became fascinated in the Americanisation of British popular culture, as he saw it, which he explores through photographing fans and hobbyists – cheerleaders in Stoke-on-Trent and Klingons in

Luton. “I was interested in how it was interpreted by people. A lot of my work is done in people’s homes, it’s the juxtaposition, the very British, strange, appropriation.” In one image, a man stands before a window in full Starship Enterprise regalia, his phaser ready to fire. Except the setting is that of an unmistakably English front room, slightly tatty with brownish decor. The work doesn’t make fun of the subjects, however – they choose their own stance and there is a certain pride in every one.

The time at college has begun to pay off – Schofield has just received a large commission to look into customs from other cultures that have been embraced in Britain, and those from Britain that have been taken on by immigrants who have settled here. If you belong to an all-Muslim ladies’ brass band, perhaps, he’d love to hear from you.

Edith Maybin, photographer

Maybin’s images – rich, dreamily lit, almost vintage in their feel – are deceptive. A beautiful girl stands in a room wearing old-fashioned underwear. Look a little longer and you realise that the girl’s body is that of a slender woman, but her face is that of a six-year-old. It’s very unsettling.

This chimera is created by Maybin using her own body and her daughter’s face, to explore the subject of mother-daughter relationships. “We set up a little play act – she would mimic me and I would mimic her so that I could digitally put it together.”

The subject is one that Maybin feared at first might be clichéd, but her own experience of motherhood made her realise that there was still more to be said. “There’s so much rubbish talked about that just isn’t what mothers go through,” she says. “There are very strong structures still of what’s expected of her, how she is to perform. I think there’s still a strong Victorianism about how we approach family and work.” She deals with the taboos of motherhood, the fears involved for the child and for one’s self; of the daughter growing up, of losing her and the difficulty of carving out an identity in the space between one’s own mother and daughter.

It’s cerebral stuff, but Maybin plays a subtle game and the viewer isn’t bludgeoned into complicity. The images are undeniably and deliberately beautiful and you can choose to leave it at that. “But you might care to look further,” says Maybin, “and those are the people I want to have a conversation with.”

Free Range, the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1 (www.free-range.org.uk 020-7770 6003), Thur-July 23; Anticipation, One One One, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1 (020-7637 0868), until June 9

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