The great outdoors

Eight artists get the chance to have their maquettes commissioned for the Jerwood Sculpture Park in its new home in Worcestershire, in the grounds of the stately, 17th-century Ragley Hall.

In addition, the winner (to be announced on April 19) is given £25,000.

It's a generous prize and one that a good few on this shortlist richly deserve. Only in its third year, 2005 has proved more innovative and imaginative than the two previous shortlists, although outdoor sculpture will always be the subject of some whipped-up 'controversy'.

Elizabeth de Monchaux's stainless steel Pavilion, punctured with tiny holes that apparently replicate patterns found in cloud forms, is a bit like a latter-day Parthenon. You can walk around and through it and, if it wins, it will nicely echo Ragley Hall itself.

Andrea Gregson also proposes something that might seem to have an architectural function. Her sculpture, Banquet, is a long wooden hut on timbered legs with a pitched roof and windows. A peek through the windows

reveals a dining hall and the remnants of a lavish feast. Crockery is broken, food scattered and furniture overturned. It suggests perhaps a decayed and neglected dwelling, deep in some magic forest of a Grimm fairy tale.

Elsewhere, art imitates nature with Yoko Fukada's exuberant pink garland, Venus, an upright daisy-chain fashioned from steel; Douglas White's tree, Icarus Palm, is made from strips of rubber tyres, which will take on a charred and petrified presence among the natural foliage; and Judith Dean's Ploughed Field is a bronze cast of a patch of furrowed land.

Each of the artists has responded to the environment in which their work might be placed, although David Rickard has left a little more to chance with his stainless steel mirrored cube. If it wins, the cube - aptly named Free Fall - will be dropped from a helicopter on to his chosen site, where its crushed form will be a permanent reminder of its strange arrival.

Until May 8, Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street SE1, daily 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7654 0171.

Tube: Southwark