boarded up; Heaven is a concrete wasteland for many a skateboarder

You'd think there would be plenty of other topics to keep Toby Paterson occupied. There's the fact that his site-specific acrylic murals and MDF installations are on show at the ICA in London as part of the third Beck's Futures exhibition. There's the fact that out of 180 artists he made the final 10. There's the fact that the final judgement will be made in two day's time - and if Paterson wins he'll be (pounds) 24,000 better off. Even if he doesn't win the UK's most lucrative arts prize, things are still going pretty well at the moment. But one topic keeps haunting him.

"I've done so many interviews where I've managed not to talk about skateboarding but here I am talking about it again." That's not just because, as every skateboarder will tell you, it is more than a hobby. In Paterson's case, skating and art are inseparable.

"I don't think I would have become an artist if I hadn't been introduced to skateboarding," says the 28-year-old. "I've discovered this different way of looking at things. It forced me to think about things differently rather than keeping my head down and trying to get home the quickest way possible. It made me react to my environment. Things have a different potential because of the way skateboarding made me look at them."

In the past, some of his work has shown the obvious influence of an activity that is part sport, part artform and part lifestyle. There was the recent New Plaza work at the Arches in Glasgow - essentially an indoor skate park designed by Paterson, which was used to full effect by the city's skating fraternity. There is the "skate- friendly" concrete furniture he's created for two parks in the east end of Glasgow. Yet as he puts it: "You can only build so many skate parks. Once you've made several you are no longer an artist. You are a skate park builder."

These projects are not where he excels. Paterson makes beautiful wall paintings; applying acrylics directly onto the gallery wall or on to perspex. Prior to Beck's Futures, his most successful pictures were hyper-real, two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional architectural forms, delivered in bold colours, including a beautiful crimson. It may be an art which examines the artistic value of architecture, but it still came from a youth misspent underneath the Kingston Bridge or in various concrete wastelands around Glasgow. As a skateboarder, he made use of urban environments that had been abandoned or forgotten. Now he's doing the same with his art. "I came to realise that architecture was a way of measuring human ideas and human endeavours," he says. And not always to their greater glory. Glasgow's draconian attitude towards skateboarders (Paterson has spent a couple of nights in a police cell after being collared on his board) forces them into even more unsuccessful areas of urban architecture.

"I could never be an architect because I usually think bad architecture is really amazing," he confesses. "It can be just as beautiful. I am fascinated by the Anderston Centre in Glasgow which was designed by Richard Seifert, who also did the Centre Point block in London - because essentially it is bad architecture. It was meant to have commercial as well as residential areas, but it never took off just because it was so close to the city centre and it was surrounded by wasteland. It's this bizarre folly to the idea prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s that you could design a megastructure which would supply nearly every need of the residents."

From another building, he isolated a brutal concrete stair and painted a simple, stylish anatomy of it onto the wall of a gallery in Basel in 2000. The work, Sunlit Emergency Exit, finds both the craftmanship in the design and its ultimately dehumanising effect. "My work is about this ambivalence," he says. "I really like this architecture, but I know that somehow it has failed. I've never studied architecture and it's not a job I could feel easy or happy doing. I'm interested in it as a way of learning why the world looks and works as it does."

Nothing captures his ambiguous response better than his two main contributions to the Beck's show. The first is the reproduction of a mural by the innovative Soviet architect Lubetkin, copied from a primary school on the Hallfield Estate in London. The second is an installation made from fragments of architectural model-making materials. One is an example of civil architecture at its best; the other suggests its nadir.

While the third Beck's Futures has yet again failed to set the art world alight, Paterson's contributions have been singled out for praise by London critics.

Regardless of the result, Paterson will continue with a successful programme of exhibiting in Europe, along with other artists represented by Glasgow's Modern Institute. Among other things, he is opening a two-man show in Warsaw with Martin Boyce, who was also nominated for the Beck's Futures in 2000 - its inaugural year. "The Beck's is supposed to be for new artists but I'd already been exhibiting for nearly 10 years when I was nominated," says Boyce. "I had even had an exhibition at the ICA, where the Beck's Futures exhibition is held. It's a little different for Toby because he is younger than I was. There was a lot of press, but I got the impression it was an exhibition not for new artists but for artists who were unknown in London."

Last year's Beck's shortlist yielded no Scots, but in 2000, the prize went to Glasgow artist Roddy Buchanan for his film Gobstopper, showing children holding their breath in a car. If Paterson wins, then Scots on wheels could be back in vogue.

The Beck's Futures prize is announced on Tuesday. The exhibition is at the ICA, London, until May 12. It transfers to the CCA, Glasgow, on August 3 until September 22

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