A GLASWEGIAN has won the £25,000 Turner Prize, Britain’s most provocative and pres-tigious art award, for exhibiting a boat shed which he found on the shores of the Rhine in Germany.

Simon Starling, 38, had the required dose of controversy in being picked last night. The jury was won over by his installation, Shedboatshed, at Tate Britain, which he claims to have dismantled, turned into a boat and floated down the river — before resurrecting it into a shed again.

Critics mocked the Turner, saying it should be renamed the B&Q do-it-yourself prize.

The artist has said that his works are “the physical manifestation of my thought process”. Tate curators hailed the shed as “poetic . . . a buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism”. They added: “For each project, he has learnt particular skills — model-making, boat-building, engineering ... but always stopping short of complete mastery. We can sense, in the visible fissures and joins of his works, the signs of a paradoxical ‘amateur professionalism’.”

The judges, chaired by Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director, chose Starling over Gillian Carnegie, who paints traditional subjects such as landscapes and nudes, Darren Almond, who once transported a bus stop from the Auschwitz museum in Poland as a comment on the Holocaust, and Jim Lambie, who placed bird figurines on a psychedelic floor of black, white and silver tape strips.

The prize was presented by David Lammy, the Culture Minister. The award, which began in 1984, is given to a British artist under 50 “for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work”.

Charles Thomson, co-founder of The Stuckists, who campaign for traditional artistry, said: “The Turner should be renamed the B&Q diy prize. There are plenty of hobbyists happily occupying themselves in the garden shed doing equally ingenious but ultimately futile enterprises, building Canterbury Cathedral out of matchsticks for example. It’s the sort of thing I had to do when I was in the Scouts. Starling should get his Craft Badge, first class, but not the Turner Prize.”

David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw art magazine, said that the prize was again giving “undue prominence” to mediocrity, although he said Starling was the best of the four: “He’s got some quaint charm, provided you don’t take him too seriously.”

The judges were Louisa Buck of The Art Newspaper; Kate Bush, head of art galleries, Barbican Centre; Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, art critic and lecturer, University College Dublin; and Eckhard Schneider, director, Kunsthaus Bregenz.

PAST WINNERS

Rachel Whiteread, 1993 House, a monolithic concrete cast of the inside of a condemned building

Antony Gormley, 1994 took moulds from his body

Damien Hirst, 1995 bisected carcasses of a cow and calf

Douglas Gordon, 1996 clips from 1930s film The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Gillian Wearing, 1997 videoscreen showing three rows of silent police officers

Chris Ofili, 1998 Virgin Mary figure made of elephant dung

Steve McQueen, 1999 an old tape recorder is filmed on a bed of grass

Martin Creed, 2001 bare room with a flickering light

Keith Tyson, 2002 mock-up of news for “a day that never was”, using The Times

Grayson Perry, 2003 explicit phallic imagery and scenes of child abuse