The public will tomorrow have their chance to inspect the artworks on a comparatively tame Turner Prize shortlist in which the images most likely to raise eyebrows are provided by a painter.

Gillian Carnegie is the first artist who exclusively uses paint to be nominated for the £25,000 first prize in the last five years of the competition.

However, the shock value of the competition is not being diluted entirely as Ms Carnegie’s work includes a series of paintings of a naked bottom.

Previous works entered for the country’s most rancorous award have included the Chapman brothers' copulating sex dolls cast in bronze, Chris Offili's paintings using elephant dung and Tracey Emin's unmade bed, complete with ashtray, dirty underpants and used condoms.

London-based Carnegie works in the traditional genres of landscape, still life, portraiture and the nude. A series of Black Square Paintings at first appear to be a sticky black impenetrable mass, but close up, reveal themselves to be detailed night-time woodland scenes.

Her ongoing series of "bum paintings" are described as experiments in composition, light, colour and technique, while her work "interrogates the subject of painting itself".

She has already been installed by bookmakers as the favourite for the prize, which is awarded to a British artist under the age of 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation in the previous year. The award has been won in the past by Damien Hirst, famous for his pickled sharks, and by the transvestite potter Grayson Perry.

Last year’s winner was Jeremy Deller, who created a film about President Bush’s US hometown and re-enacted a pitched battle from the 1984 miners’ strike.

A shed which was a boat and is now a shed again and a kaleidoscope floor form some of the other work on show.

Glasgow-based Simon Starling created Shedboatshed from a shed he discovered on the Rhine in Germany. The structure was dismantled and turned into a boat to be paddled down the river, complete with the remaining pieces of the shed on board, before it was resurrected as a shed again.

For Tabernas Desert Run, Starling crossed the Spanish desert on an improvised hydrogen-fuelled bicycle, which is on display. The watercolour he painted of a cactus, with the bike’s only waste product, water, is also on show.

London-based Darren Almond has created a four-screen video installation of his widowed grandmother reminiscing about her honeymoon in Blackpool, in If I Had You. One screen shows his grandmother’s face as she revisits the seaside town, another features ballroom dancers, and a third the illuminated windmill from Blackpool’s promenade. Curators described the work as "a space for anyone to dip into their own memories".

It is not too often that visitors get to walk on a piece of art, but Glasgow-based Jim Lambie’s floor installation means they have to do just that. His piece, The Kinks, includes giant bird figurines placed on a kaleidoscope floor made of black, white and silver tape strips.

In the hope of bringing the shortlist to a new audience, the organisers are assembling a virtual tour of the Turner Prize at mainline UK train stations.

The members of the Turner Prize 2005 jury are Louisa Buck, an arts correspondent with The Art Newspaper; Kate Bush, head of Art Galleries at the Barbican; Caoimhin MacGiolla Leith, art critic and lecturer at University College Dublin; Eckhard Schneider, Director at the Kunsthaus Bregenz; and Nicholas Serota who is Director of the Tate and chairman of this year’s jury.

The winner will be announced on December 5.

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