(b Darvel, Ayrshire, May 3, 1965). Scottish sculptor and installation artist. She studied from 1983 to 1987 at Glasgow School of Art and from 1987 to 1988 at the University of Ulster, Belfast. In 1997 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Borland’s works question the processes of investigation and classification that are, or have been, commonplace within institutions such as hospitals, prisons, the police and the army. Simulating the detached perspective and terminology of medical and forensic science, Borland suggests the limitations of seeing human events such as sex, love, childbirth and mortality in an abstract sense. For A Place where Nothing has Happened (1993; destr., see 1994 exh. cat., pp. 22–3), a site-specific project commissioned as part of the Tyne International in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, she asked local police officers to search an area of urban wasteland for evidence of the type used in criminal investigations. When their findings were displayed in a Portakabin, the absence of any motivating crime made clear that it was the investigative process itself which was being laid bare for examination. In ...