Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield is an American artist known for her sculptures of horses. She and her husband, artist John Buck, divide their time between Hawaii and a farm in Bozeman, Montana, where Butterfield trains, rides, and bonds with her horses.

Butterfield’s early horse sculptures from the 1970s were made of materials such as mud, clay, and sticks that that she found at a variety of locations, including rivers and beaches. She typically begins by gathering driftwood and other natural elements to assemble a skeleton-like armature, adding smaller branches to define the curves and graceful lines of the equestrian form. In her later pieces, she then dismantled the assembled structures, cast the forms in bronze, and then reassembled the parts into their original positions.

Butterfield explains that her horse imagery provides her with a way of creating a metaphorical self-portrait. She has created horses in a myriad of poses, postures, and attitudes, from standing upright, as in this work, to grazing or lying down—each with its own individual personality. The spaces between the branches give her horse its rhythm and relative density while inviting the viewer to discover hidden secrets, such as the root that is wrapped around a rock.