Turner Prize upset as still life painter shortlisted

Sherna Noah

Gillian Carnegie, 34, is the first artist who exclusively uses paint as a medium to be nominated for the £25,000 (37,000) prize for five years.

The other three nominees are Darren Almond, who displayed bus stops he saw outside the Auschwitz Museum in Poland in a gallery in Berlin; Jim Lambie, known for his psychedelic floor pieces, and environmentally-friendly artist Simon Starling, 38, who rode a moped across the Andalucian desert in Andalucia which generated power using 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 in the studio to create a watercolour painting of a cactus.

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

The prize has thrown up controversial winners such as Damien Hirst, famous for his pickled shark, Chris Ofili, who has incorporated elephant dung into his paintings, and transvestite potter Grayson Perry.

Shortlisted artists are invited to present work in the prize show, which begins on October 18. The winner is named on December 5.

Judging panel chairman Nicholas Serota said the four artists worked differently, but they had not set out to select such different individuals.

Almond uses photography, film, sculpture and installation in his works, which have included a live satellite broadcast in which a wall-sized projection of his empty London studio was transmitted into an exhibition venue on the other side of the city.

His ongoing Fullmoon series consisted of long exposure photographs of landscapes taken at night which "portray a powerful and eerie sense of frozen time".

Judges said of Bus Stop, which involved exchanging the real things outside the Auschwitz Museum with the newly-built replacements, that he "attempted to represent the unrepresentable the Holocaust".

Judges said they were impressed by the way Carnegie "questions and celebrates painting".

They described Carnegie, who always works in oils, as a "quiet and private artist", adding: "There's no fireworks here, her palette is always sombre."

The artist's works include a continuing series of still life paintings, Fleur d'Huile 2001, featuring a withering bunch of flowers in a plastic mineral water bottle.

Starling has not always been environmentally- friendly to make his point about the exploitation of natural resources.

In 2002 he put a car engine in a gallery and ran it continuously to provide heat for a cactus to survive.