Only five days to go until the winner of this year’s Turner Prize is announced!

After all the furore surrounding Britain’s best-known contemporary art prize in recent years (controversial for unmade beds and lights being turned on and off), a degree of calm has returned this year. The tabloids struggled to spot anything controversial… apart from a naked bum in Enrico David’s display.

David, who is described as a surrealist, is the odd one out – while his installation of paper maché Humpty Dumpties on skis and an elongated black cloth figure  draped over a stage made me smile, I failed to see the ideas behind them. The other three are all serious contenders for the £25,000 prize: Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright.

It is important to remember that the artists get judged on the work they were nominated for – which can be considerably different from what’s on show at Tate Britain. So for example, Hiorns was nominated for pouring copper sulphate into a derelict south London flat and transforming it into a magical grotto shimmering with blue crystals (pictured).

The ‘alchemist’s display at the Tate pales in comparison. A landscape formed of heaps of grey powder on the floor turns out to be an atomised passenger plane, alongside two lumpy sculptures made of plastic and cow brain.

Lucy Skaer, who draws a lot, is also interested in transformation, and puts images from newspapers or the internet through a long process to make drawings, sculptures and films. She has been nominated for her solo show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, where she showed sculpture and drawings such as a recreation of Hokusai’s Great Wave composed of thousands of tiny black spirals, and for A Boat Used as a Vessel at the Kunsthalle Basel.

Her sperm whale at the Tate is her most eye catching installation so far.  It is situated behind a wall and only visible through vertical slits – which makes it impossible to see the whole skeleton from the side and appears to distort the form. The whale in its entirety can only be seen from the front where it is foreshortened. The piece plays with our perception and creates a certain frustration – I loved it. In that sense it reminded me of Plato’s Cave (where prisoners see shadows of objects rather than the real things).

Skaer has also recast Brancusi’s Bird in Space in compressed coal dust as a flock of 26 black birds standing huddled together on the floor, or upright letters (the piece is entitled Black Alphabet).

Richard Wright paints on walls and ceilings, sometimes covering entire rooms with his delicate patterns. There is an unobtrusive, small but perfectly formed red design over the door as you enter his room at the Tate (but you only see it if you turn around). The first thing you see is a large baroque composition in gold leaf on the wall straight ahead, made up of symmetrical, Rorschach blot-like patterns that echo certain structures on the floor. It is certainly a pleasure to behold, ever-changing as the light shifts on the gold leaf when you move, but I wouldn’t go so far as saying that Wright’s paintings have the power to fundamentally transform a space, as the blurb states.

It’s going to be a close-run thing between Skaer and Hiorns, but my money is on Hiorns for his dazzling flat transformation Seizure (incidentally, he is also the bookies’ favourite).

The winner will be announced on Channel 4 on Monday, 7 December.