An artist who has said of himself: "I have a bad record with destroying things", has won this year's Turner prize.
Simon Starling is no provocateur. Nor was he a shock winner - the bookies made him the even-money favourite. But nonetheless, it will come as no surprise to those who regard the Turner prize with disdain that the softly spoken, slightly geekish, rather skeletal figure of Starling has won £25,000 (€36,934) for dismantling and assembling a wooden shed.
Starling, who was born in 1967, found the shed on the banks of the Rhine, took it apart, made parts of it into a boat, and used the vessel to carry the remaining parts of it downriver to Basle. It was then reassembled as a shed in a Swiss museum.
The display of his work at the Turner prize exhibition at Tate Britain in London also includes a makeshift motorised bicycle, which Starling used to ride across the Tabernas desert in southern Spain. It was powered by hydrogen in lightweight canisters that reacted with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce water as a byproduct. The artist used that in turn to paint a simple watercolour of a cactus he found en route. The watercolour is installed alongside the oversized, makeshift bike.
Starling calls his work a "physical manifestation of a thought process". According to Tate curator Rachel Tant: "He's interested in the creation of objects; he is a researcher, traveller, narrator. He looks at how things got to be the way they are, and reasserts a human connection between processes we take for granted."
The prize was awarded last night by UK arts minister David Lammy, at a ceremony which one prominent artist referred to as a "school dinner for the British art world".
Mr Lammy said of the prize: "Its true genius is that for a couple of days every year, everyone gets to be an expert, no matter what they think about art."
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and chair of the judges, praised all four artists for a "powerful presentation of contemporary British art". But he also took the opportunity in his speech to defend the Tate against the recent allegations of corruption surrounding the purchase of Chris Ofili's installation The Upper Room, criticised in some quarters because of Ofili's status as a trustee of the Tate.
"Tate has been acquiring works by serving artist trustees since the 1950s but in recent years we have decided to do this only in exceptional circumstances," he said.