REMEMBER the character of Professor Pat Pending in The Wacky Races? He was the tufty-haired boffin always tinkering with his latest contraption, converting one thing into another so that it would win the cartoon car race.

I can’t remember him reaching the finishing post first. But that doesn’t appear to have deterred his artistic heir, Simon Starling. The Turner Prize candidate who turned a garden shed into a boat has just sailed away contemporary art’s most prestigious award.

Starling’s work is certainly cartoon-like in mood. He aims, he suggests, to make ideas visible, to create a physical manifestation of mental processes. There is something inherently poetic about his pieces, even if the end product, displayed in the gallery, almost caricatures all the crankiness that audiences have come to expect of the conceptual.

This obvious ridiculousness is part of each project’s pleasure. But it is also an important part of their point. To labour one’s way on some improvised electric bicycle whose only by-product is water across a baking desert and then use the collected waste to paint a picture of the supremely efficient cactus, is to point out a ludicrous gap between human effort and natural simplicity. This is more than an absurdly convoluted demonstration of futility. It begs important questions about the ways that we negotiate our planet.

A series of platinum prints showing the vast quantities of ore mined to produce five little images illustrates the gross disparity between a production process and its end product. And is this really so odd, in a week when the world’s largest artificial ski slope, complete with tons of manufactured “snow”, has just opened in the desert state of Dubai?

Starling’s work has a visionary quality. He stands as an inheritor of the cranky but quintessentially British tradition of William Blake or Samuel Palmer — or maybe even James Bond. At his most ambitious, he entwines complex ideas with a sharp political point. But on a simple level, who does not understand what it means to sit in the creosoted peace of the shed and dream of sailing away on a boat — or, indeed, soaring off as a Turner prizewinner?