LONDON — Simon Starling, an installation artist who dismantled a shed and rode its pieces down one of Europe's main rivers before putting it back together again, has won the Turner prize, Britain's most controversial art award.

Starling, who describes his work as "the physical manifestation of a thought process," was presented with a check for $43,000 during a ceremony Monday at London's Tate Britain gallery.

The 38-year-old Scottish artist's entry featured "Shedboatshed," a shed he took apart, turned into a boat that he paddled down the Rhine, and then reconstructed as a shed.

Another part of his entry was "Tabernas Desert Run," a mo-ped he rode across a Spanish desert. The vehicle 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 he collected in a bottle and later used in a watercolor painting.

"I don't like to be thought of as eccentric, because that's not what my work is about," he said Monday in accepting the prize.

"I went on a little expedition up the Rhine to find a structure I could use for a project, and I found this shed," he said. "It had a paddle on the side, so it was just an incredible piece of luck."

The favorite to win this year's prize had been Gillian Carnegie, a painter whose work includes still lifes, landscapes and a series of nudes she calls "bum paintings." She was the first nominee in five years who exclusively uses the medium of paint.

But the prize once synonymous with taboo-flouting "Brit Art" upstarts such as cow-pickler Damien Hirst, dung painter Chris Ofili and cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry has mellowed.

This year's finalists were more quirky than controversial, and included Darren Almond, a multimedia artist whose entry included a video installation of his widowed grandmother revisiting the seaside town where she spent her honeymoon.