Video artists of everyday life win £30,000 prizes

They took their inspiration from bus journeys and football tournaments but their collective works, featuring images of tipsy businessmen, Glaswegian wide-boys and foul-mouthed cooks, have distinguished them as five of Britain's most promising artists.

They took their inspiration from bus journeys and football tournaments but their collective works, featuring images of tipsy businessmen, Glaswegian wide-boys and foul-mouthed cooks, have distinguished them as five of Britain's most promising artists.

The artists, Tomma Abts, Roderick Buchanan, Lucy Gunning, Graham Gussin and Bedwyr Williams, were celebrating last night after each scooping a £30,000 arts prize at the Paul Hamlyn awards ceremony.

They were picked from 82 other established artists to be awarded one of the art world's most generous prizes for their work over the past decade.

Previous winners of the accolade, which aims to reward artists at a crucial point in their careers, have gone on to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize. They include Jeremy Deller and Anya Gallaccio.

Video installations dominated the winning works, including Ms Gunning's triptych of drunken businessmen struggling to decipher train timetables, a "protest" tree house near a quarry and people practising the breathing exercise qi gong.

Mr Buchanan's video installation, including Gobstopper, a film of children holding their breath as their car enters a tunnel, and series of 49 photographs called Coast to Coast - Dennistoun, which documented Glaswegians wearing baseball caps within one square mile of his home, were included in his submission.

The work of Mr Williams, a performance artist from Wales, includes an installation about a day in the life of a porter in which he is shown dancing on his boss's desk, as well as a short film on ranting chefs, and a mural made from damp patches.

Ms Abts, from Germany, the only winner not to produce video art, creates shadowy images which she said referred to the "mental process of creating images" and oscillates between a real and illusory sense of space.

Mr Gussin created sublime landscape images from the horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Art critics said that the emphasis on video art legitimised the medium at a time when collectors were turning back to paintings. Jane Hamlyn, a member of the judging panel, said that the criteria was producing "provoking pieces of work".