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[Photograph: Pavel Büchler's You Don't Love Me (2007). Photograph: Leeds City Gallery.]

The subject of iam’s forthcoming documentary, making nothing happen (dir. Simon Morris; funded by Manchester Metropolitan University and York College; due September 2010), Pavel Büchler, has been awarded the 2010 Northern Art Prize.

Martin Wainwright’s report on the ceremony for The Guardian, Friday 22 January, 2010, follows:

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Büchler scoops the North’s answer to the Turner Prize, declaring his love for Manchester’s buzzing art scene.

He claimed to have last won a competition when he was 13, but artist Pavel Büchler played it cool last night when a packed gallery in Leeds heard that he had taken the third Northern Art prize.

In a generous compliment to his four rivals on the shortlist, Büchler regretted that artists had to be pitted against one another to drum up interest in the arts, especially when they happen to be outside London. “I really don’t think that we should be put in a position where art is treated as a competitive sport,” he said. “It is good to see so many people here and so much interest, but perhaps equally a reason to despair.”

Everyone who took part deserved the prize, he said, after accepting his £16,500 winnings from sculptor Richard Deacon, one of this year’s five judges. Matt Stokes, Rachel Goodyear and the partnership of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson will each receive £1,500 for being shortlisted for the north’s leading contemporary art award, which is attempting to become a northern version of the Turner prize, won by Deacon in 1987.

Büchler, 58, has been an influential figure in British art for many years since moving from Prague to establish a base in Manchester. His entry for the prize, an installation named Eclipse, takes up the largest of four rooms at Leeds City Art Gallery. Based partly on poetry and partly on science education, it uses nine projectors from the 1950s to cast interlocking shadows from a range of balls and other spherical objects. A second work, You Don’t Love Me, combines audio tape and a recorder with a bottle of whisky, making an analogy between bootleg alcohol and an illegal recording of a live gig.

The judges (alongside Deacon were Patricia Bickers, editor at Art Monthly; Paul Hobson, director of the Contemporary Art Society; Peter Murray, director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall of Leeds City Art Gallery) said in their citation that “Büchler has been consistently influential to a huge amount of people throughout his career, both as a practitioner and teacher”.

Büchler acknowledged the influence on his work of having a base in the north – the one criterion for artists entering the prize. He said: “I’m an old man and London is far too busy for me; I love Manchester. Of all the regional cities I know, it has the least ‘regional’ attitude. Artists there are not chippy about the rest of the world.”

The popular vote, taken from visitors to the shortlist exhibition, went to Matt Stokes, who is based in Gateshead but exhibits all over the world. His film of punk-rock subculture in Austin, Texas, was originally commissioned for an exhibition there, but seems equally at home in Leeds.

Rachel Goodyear, 31, from Oldham and now based in Manchester, entered a portfolio of intensely realistic drawings of fantastical subjects. The partnership of Crowe and Rawlinson (from Barnsley and Macclesfield, respectively) offered a video work entitled The Four Horsemen, in which flowers morph into bug-like figures.

Simon Wallis, director of the Hepworth gallery, which opens next year in Wakefield, said: “The prize is galvanising attention on a region that really is becoming very exciting in terms of the quality of artists working here.” Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool, agreed: “We are fighting against the London centre of gravity,” he said. “And so we should be: there is incredible work going on here.”

Before leaving, Büchler recounted his first art-prize victory as a teenager – a competition to write a history essay that won him a 40-minute flight over Prague. He recalled initially being angry that the pilot didn’t land to drop off the runners-up, who were supposed to have only 20 and 10 minutes respectively, but soon reconsidered. “I first of all thought it was unfair, but in the end we all flew around for at least two hours,” he said. “That’s how it should be.”

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Büchler also authored the pocketbook, The Answer to the Question, published by iam in 2005.