The North-South divide widened a little today as designs for a sculpture twice as high as the Angel of the North were unveiled in Kent.

Mark Wallinger, the Turner Prize winner who famously exhibited a video of himself dressed up as a bear, is the favourite of five artists commissioned to come up with ideas for the £2 million sculpture.

His creation – a 50ft high white horse, 33 times life-size – would stand at around the same height as Nelson’s column.

Wallinger, who won the 2007 Turner Prize for a recreation of Brian Haw’s 40-metre-long anti-war protest, has named the horse "Horsa" after the mythological Anglo-Saxon leader who landed near Ebbsfleet in the 6th century.

If chosen, Horsa will loom over the Ebbsfleet valley, to the north of the A2, from 2010.

Other shortlisted artists include Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread, both Turner Prize winners.

Deacon is proposing to build a metal “nest”, comprised of 26 differently shaped polyhedrons – corresponding to the number of letters in the alphabet.

Whiteread plans to create a craggy, “recycled mountain”, on top of which would sit a life-size cast interior of a house. This follows on from her previous work: a concrete cast of the inside of a house.

The French artist Daniel Buren and Christopher Le Brun, a Portsmouth-born sculptor, have also been shortlisted.

Buren wants to build a “signal”, a tower of stacked cubes through which a single laser beam of light would pass. Le Brun is proposing to carve a wing and a disc into the chalk landscape of North Kent – a reference to the winged messenger of Mercury.

The winning sculpture, which will be announced this autumn, will be visible from road, rail and air. It will stand on a hilltop to mark the new Ebbsfleet International station and the planned transformation of Ebbsfleet Valley.

An exhibition of the proposals will go on show in the Bluewater shopping centre from 27 May 2008.

Antony Gormley’s steel Angel of the North was unveiled on a hill overlooking the A1 at Gateshead in 1998 and has been become a British icon. It cost £1 million – half the cost of the new Southern equivalent.

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