Turner Prize shock as painter is shortlisted

The Turner Prize provided a shock of a different kind today when an artist known for painting the most conventional of subject matters - vases of flowers - was shortlisted for the usually controversial award.

The Turner Prize provided a shock of a different kind today when an artist known for painting the most conventional of subject matters - vases of flowers - was shortlisted for the usually controversial award.

Gillian Carnegie, 34, is the first artist who exclusively uses paint as a medium to be nominated for the £25,000 prize for five years.

The other three nominees announced today are Wigan-born Darren Almond, who displayed bus stops he saw outside the Auschwitz Museum in Poland in a gallery in Berlin; Glasgow-born Jim Lambie, who is known for his psychedelic floor pieces, and environmentally friendly artist Simon Starling, 38, who rode a moped across the desert in Andalucia which generated power using only compressed bottled hydrogen and oxygen from the desert air.

The only waste product from the moped's crossing was water which was contained in a bottle and used back in the studio to create a watercolour painting of a cactus from the Epsom, Surrey-born artist's travels.

The judges said although Carnegie used traditional genres such as landscape, still life and portraiture, her work explored the "fundamental properties of painting".