An artist who made his name by presenting a real racehorse as a work of art was betting yesterday on his proposal for a giant horse to win a £2 million commission for an “Angel of the South” sculpture.

Mark Wallinger's standing white stallion will be so huge that a person will be no taller than one of its hooves. At 50 metres - 164ft or 492 hands - it will be higher than any public artwork, towering over a site bigger than 50 football pitches.

He is one of five artists — with Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon, Christopher Le Brun and Rachel Whiteread — competing for Britain's largest art commission.

The artwork is to mark the building of Ebbsfleet International station in north Kent, through which Eurostar runs, and the Ebbsfleet Valley, a development of 10,000 new homes on open land between Dartford and Gravesend.

Each artist revealed models for sculptures yesterday that they propose to build on a hilltop. The winning work will be chosen this autumn by art experts after a public consultation in the Bluewater shopping centre.

Sponsors hope that the winning artwork will become accepted as southern England's answer to The Angel of the North, Antony Gormley's 20m structure near Gateshead. The Angel was Britain's last significant public art commission, at a cost of £800,000. Whereas The Angel was funded with public money, the Ebbsfleet cost is being covered by Eurostar, London & Continental Railways and Land Securities, developers of Ebbsfleet Valley.

Wallinger represented Britain at the 2001 Venice Biennale with a video of himself as a blind man muttering Gospel verses backwards. He won the £25,000 Turner Prize last year with a video of himself dressed as a bear. Yesterday he described his proposed sculpture as a faithful representation of a thoroughbred racehorse in all but scale, being 33 times life-size.

He is now seeking a live stallion to scan into a computer from which craftsmen and engineers will make the sculpture. Probably using steel, they will construct the horse in much the same way that a hull of a ship is built.

He said that the horse in Anglo-Saxon mythology was significant. “Horsa, from which the word ‘horse' is derived, was the semi-mythological leader of the Anglo-Saxons who landed on Thanet in the 6th century and so the white horse became the symbol of Kent. They were from Germany and Denmark,” he added, suggesting that his sculpture refered to the topical subject of immigration.

The precise measurements and method of weighting down the sculpture have yet to be decided. The artist spoke of struts and spars to make a “super-structure” of the horse's body. A self-cleaning paint now on the market would keep it white, he hopes.

The engineering consultancy WSP Group is technical adviser to the project and will make feasibility studies. Wallinger said that he had been told that his horse could be made within the £2 million budget.

Planning permission will be required.

Daniel Buren is a French artist who has covered rooms with stripes. This time he is proposing a tower of stacked cubes through which a single laser beam would soar about 200 miles (320km) into space. It would be visible from 50 miles away.

The other nominees are all British. Richard Deacon is proposing a steel structure of 26 interconnecting polyhedrons, and Christopher Le Brun has designed a giant wing, a reference to the winged messenger Mercury, the Roman god of travellers, and to the area's Roman history.

One art observer said: “Mercury is an unfortunate choice. He also escorted dead souls on their last journey.”

Rachel Whiteread made her name with a concrete cast of the inside of a London building, which went on to win her the Turner Prize in 1993 before being demolished by the local council. Now she is proposing to re-create it on a craggy, “recycled mountain” made of discarded material “like a castle in a magical, fairytale scene”.

Wallinger emerged as an initial favourite with some critics. Michael Hall, editor of the magazine Apollo, said: “It could be beautiful, both as a silhouette and in the daytime.”

How it compares to other monumental sculputures

— One of the seven wonders of the world, the Colossus of Rhodes stood 110ft (33m) high on a 50ft pedestal

— The statue of Mother Russia at Mamaev Kurgan, the 1967 memorial to the dead of Stalingrad, stands 171ft high, plus 108ft for a sword above her head

— A rotating gold statue of Turkmenbashi, former leader of Turkmenistan, was removed from its position atop a 246ft tower in the capital Ashgabat last month. The effigy, built in 1998, measured 40ft and cost roughly £6 million

— The outstretched hands of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro span almost 100ft. It stands 100ft tall on a 20ft pedestal atop the 2,300ft peak of Corcovado mountain

— Antony Gormley's The Angel of the North, at Gateshead, is a steel sculpture 66ft tall, with 178ft wings The Wooden Horse of Troy: no precise height is known but Virgil's Aeneid states that it could hold a company of soldiers and weapons in its belly alone

— The heads alone of the four American presidents whose busts are carved into the side of Mount Rushmore, South Dakota measure 60ft. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt took 14 years to carve and were finished in 1941. The figures can be seen by the naked eye from a distance of 60 miles

Sources: unmuseum.org; lonelyplanet.com; copacabana.info; Times archives

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