Next week, the international art world will flock to Frieze, the art fair in which, for the fifth year running, the world's top galleries will show in what feels like a monster, overlit scout tent in Regent's Park.

But the Frieze phenomenon has spawned a smaller, more deft rival called Zoo, in some respects more interesting than Frieze. Frieze is to a large extent about fêting the big galleries and the big names that they represent. They are all here: White Cube, Gagosian, Victoria Miro; Gormley, Opie, Emin and all the name-checkable rest.

Zoo, in the building behind the Royal Academy in London that used to house the Museum of Mankind, is smaller - there are just over 50 galleries to Frieze's 150 - lighter on its feet, a touch more inventive, and exclusively about the young and emerging. “All of the galleries are under six years old,” says Soraya Rodríguez, the director of Zoo. “We also try to include as many non-commercial arts organisations as possible - artists' collectives, project spaces, curatorial groups.” The Zoo names may not be well known now, but they will be.

Which is where Karla Black comes in, a young artist who works in Glasgow and who, last year, won the Zoo Champagne Perrier-Jouet Prize for the best artist at the fair. The prize was worth £10,000 - the cost of renting a studio in Glasgow for an entire year, with a bit on top. This year Black has a small solo exhibition at the fair - look out for it. “What we liked about her,” says Sir Norman Rosenthal, the chairman of the award, “was the simplicity of the work. She works with the simplest and most humble of domestic materials - anything from polythene to soap or plaster - and somehow makes extraordinarily imaginative works of art out of them. It felt like a new manifestation of Arte Povera, the Italian movement that emerged in the 1960s and used exactly the same kind of disposable materials.”

Black herself arrived at art by a circuitous route. She grew up in a postwar council house in the small town of Alexandria in West Dumbartonshire. Her dad was a bottling-hall engineer in a local factory. Black left a “horrible” secondary school at the age of 16, worked in a bank and got into local journalism - one of her first jobs was on the Dumbarton Reporter. Then, when she was 19, her older brother gave her a bag of clay and she began making sculptures with it in her bedroom, imitative of Rodin and others at first. The passion grew, and eventually, without any formal qualifications, she was accepted at Glasgow Art School, from where she graduated in 1999.

Black's work is crazily likeable stuff, difficult to pigeonhole. It sprawls across the floor, hangs suspended from the ceiling. It's about the uncontrollable mess of everyday life. “It's nearly a painting and nearly a performance and nearly an installation, but it's really sculpture” is how she describes it. For Wish List, for example, she took various sheets of sugar paper, dollops of hair gel, superglue and some nail polish. Then she crumpled it all up and creased it, folded it up on itself, twisted it about a bit, and finally suspended it from the ceiling so that it looked a bit like an unusable hammock. “I suppose you could say that the work is very gestural,” she says.

Black often makes work on site to experience the thrill of instantaneous creation. When the show is over, works are often broken up or destroyed and are then remade at a later date in a slightly different way. One of her great heroines is the comedian Bobby Baker, who is forever grappling with unruly domestic objects.

“Karla's work reminds me of Eva Hesse's,” Rodríguez says. “It's both personal and political at the same time. It deals with the body, the fragility of materials - and the vulnerability of human existence. It's wonderful how she can take the most humdrum stuff and transform it, as if by magic.”

Black can't quite tell me what works will be in that 6m-square room at Zoo because, well, she doesn't exactly know, not until she kneels down on the floor and gets stuck in.

The Zoo Art Fair is at the Royal Academy of Arts, W1 (020-7247 8597; www.zooartfair.com), from Fri to Mon

WHO TO LOOK OUT FOR ON YOUR DAY AT THE ZOO

More than 50 of the best young international and British galleries, all less than six years old, are exhibiting at Zoo Art Fair this year, making it the best place to find the art stars of tomorrow. Look out for witty work by Jack Strange at the Limoncello Gallery, London, and pleasingly subversive sculptures by Eric Bainbridge at Workplace Gallery from Gateshead. Katie Paterson's winsome but scientifically rigorous work is a delight at ROOM from London, while Haris Epaminonda's rather disconcerting videos make the Istanbul-based Rodeo gallery worth a visit. Among Zoo's projects is a solo exhibition from Elad Lassry, the winner of last year's John Jones Art on Paper Award, and 176 gallery will be showing specially produced affordable works by artists including Mark Titchner, Susan Collis and Graham Hudson.

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