My fairytale landscape

Rachel Whiteread grew up near the site for the planned 'Angel of the South'. She explains how its industrial expanses have inspired her life's work
Ebbsfleet Landmark
Home from homes ... Rachel Whiteread's Ebbsfleet Landmark proposal. Photograph: Robert Glowacki/Todd-White Art Photography

I have always found this part of the country a really interesting, ugly-beautiful landscape. Places like the Dagenham Ford Works I remember clearly from driving though the area with my father as a child. To me, the Ebbsfleet valley is the closest thing we have to America in this country, in terms of industrial landscape - this long flat expanse with buildings that merge into the distance. It's a place I can really relate to.

I'm interested in looking at how places such as Bluewater shopping centre, which is like a spaceship that has landed in this area, relate to the landscape. You've got white craggy chalk faces, which aren't dissimilar to the Seven Sisters in Sussex, or the White Cliffs of Dover. You've also got the movement of vast quantities of material for the construction of new spaces and dwellings, as well as the old cement works.

Out of this came an idea to make a kind of recycled fairytale mountain.

It would have different views: from the road, you would have a craggy mountain; from the settlements, you would have a way to walk up it; and from the park, there would be a much softer approach. On top of this mountain, I wanted to make a generic house, similar to the House I made in east London in 1993, only this time using the model of the house that I used to live in. I want to make a monument to everybody's homes.

The other dominant feature of the Ebbsfleet landscape is the pylons. They are beautiful objects, on a massive scale; they are almost skeletal. The juxtaposition with my sculpture will make it even more fairytale-like. For a long time now, I've been working with dolls' houses: I've been collecting them for more than 20 years, and they are going on show at the Hayward Gallery in London later this month. So my Village, which I first exhibited in Naples in 2006, is now growing into a settlement.

My own practice as a sculptor began with the idea of trying to make a space concrete that didn't really exist before. I had a childhood memory of sitting inside a wardrobe and wanting to recreate the black space. Later, I thought about casting the space under a table. I remember looking underneath one and thinking: "Well, actually, no one has really ever done this - what is this place? How do I turn it into something familiar, yet monumental?" Everything started with a very simple notion, but the making of it has become much more complex now.

I cast the insides of things, and I have made a number of architectural pieces. The difference with the Ebbsfleet commission, or Angel of the South, if I were to get it, is that I would not cast from the actual house; I would make the house and then crane it into position. The mound that the house sits on would be created from materials drawn from the area, though when you are working on something like this, you have to give yourself a range of possibilities.

I've got quite a strange relationship with public sculpture. I really can't bear "plop art", where things are just put down in the street, and you trip over them. You very rarely see a good piece of work that has been made as a part of our urban landscape. I think the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is a positive example of how it can work: the interesting thing is how a number of artists have responded differently. It's actually a really good place for people to rant about public art.

Everybody in the country seems to know something about art now. They certainly didn't 10 years ago, or even five years ago. It has become highly popularist, which is fine. Everyone is so engaged, and not everyone is an expert.

My proposal for Ebbsfleet is really a combination of decades of stuff, of thoughts and practice. For 20 years now, I have tried to give the domestic space, those forgotten places and spaces, a sort of testament to them-selves. I didn't want to just make another House, even though I am extremely proud of that work. It is not that I want to influence millions of people who will pass the site by car or train; a lot of people will initially perceive it as a house. They may not even notice it when they are driving by. But as you walk up to it, it would become stranger, an inside-out house. The light switches and the door handles would be inverted - those little details would become more obvious.

Everything I make draws on any number of references. I see movies, I read books; wherever I go, I hunt out old photographs. I make lots of drawings: some are carefully drawn and painted; some are collages. It's how I worry things through. When I first visited this site with the curator of the project, it was pouring with rain and very windy. I kept saying to her: "Could you just hold that?" We picked up lots of stones, chalk, other objects. I took photographs of the concrete spills, the textures of things. The mountain in my model is made of papier-mache and small plaster casts of pieces of chalk. This is my precipitous, craggy mountain and monument to a generic home and castle.