Deborah Butterfield | A History of Butterfield's Work


Cast Bronze Sculpture

Butterfield has been creating life-size horses from sticks and plant material from which she creates a casting in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington State. These large horses have been the subject of several public outdoor commissions and are generally slightly larger than life size. Furthermore, being made of bronze, they have the ability to be placed out of doors.
Butterfield sculpts the original piece by piece by fastening logs, branches, sticks, planks, and boards onto an armature that gives the basic posture of the particular horse. After fashioning the horse out of wood and organic material, the piece is photographed from all sides and angles, particularly the areas where individual pieces are joined. These photos are used to reconstruct the various elements after casting.

Found Metal Sculpture

In the 1980s Butterfield began building full-size horses from found metal salvaged from scrap yards. While the unevenly rusted surface of the found metal work suggests the coloring of types of horses - an appaloosa, chestnut or perhaps a dapple-gray - Butterfield is not obsessed with replicating any aspect of the horse in specific. Nonetheless, in any one of the sculptures, the architectural structure, contour, and mass of the horse are readily apparent. Often, the weighty and crumpled metal pieces used for the shoulders and rump suggest powerful muscles. Carefully choosing from her scrap yard of parts and pieces, she suggests some of the most delicate and surprising aspects of the horse. A massive metal fire escape was twisted into a powerful stallion in a large work that is part of the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. In another work, the curve of an industrial part suggests the neck and mane of the horse in a most uncanny way.

Many of the recent works are made of found metal; most of it bearing colored paint remnants from its original surface. The artist collects metal from wrecked cars, industrial salvage yards, demolished buildings and construction sites and combines them in her Montana studio to create these equine sculptures. Some of the works have utilized three-dimensional letters scavenged from commercial signage bringing an unexpected new element into play. Butterfield has also recently used painted metal from flat signage.

In constructing her horses Butterfield tries to alter the "as found" shape of the metal pieces as little as possible. The separate parts are not often individually important but gain an elegant context in the artist’s ability to meld them into such a suggestive sculpture. Occasionally, recognizable elements such as a child's tricycle can still be identified within the tangled assemblage of metal parts.



The Small Horses

Butterfield’s small sculptures measure roughly three feet tall by four feet in length, a size that the artist relates to ancient Chinese ceramic sculptures of the Tang Dynasty. They are not intended to be seen as colts or as baby horses, but as miniatures relating to artworks depicting horses. Butterfield has never been interested in the naturalistic depiction of horses in the common sense of realism in the art world. She prefers that her small works be viewed on pedestals to alleviate any confusion as to her intention regarding the abstract nature of her sculpture.

Early Organic Sculpture

Butterfield’s earliest works were made of mud, clay and sticks. While these works were artistically very satisfying to the artist, they sometimes proved difficult to exhibit, ship or maintain due to the fragile nature of the materials. In 1980, artist Deborah Butterfield was invited to spend several weeks producing sculpture at The Experimental Workshop in San Francisco. It was hoped that an editionable work would result from that period of time. Instead, the artist used the time to make individual works with no possibility of editioning.

Her time at the Experimental Workshop studios was also expanded to encompass four sessions. A total of 39 pieces were developed with the help of the studio technicians with expertise using various materials. The artist worked with paper pulp and organic material (sheet paper, raffia, plant fiber), wood (twigs and sticks), and metals (copper, brass, or steel).

In December 1980 a total of 12 works were created; in May of 1981 a total of 8 works were created (including "Palomino"); in June of 1982 the artist made 13 pieces and, finally, in June of 1984 she made only 6 pieces.

Each creative burst lasted two to three weeks and only a few horses were produced with each visit. Each session focused on a fundamental media of interest to the artist, but still maintained diversity of size and material. Very experimental methods of material application were explored within the idea of making a series of objects. Care was taken to yield stable and long lasting work. Each horse is unique, but they all have an organic, earthy palette.

"Palomino" was created during the paper pulp session which proved to be the most interesting and varied work for Deborah. Butterfield recalls that this particular piece was made with the leaves of water growing lily or iris type plants, similar to what Native American baskets are woven from. The material appealed to her because of the possibility of wrapping her armature rather than weaving it into a self-supporting, free-standing sculpture. The paper pulp was added over the surface to give the effect of a Palomino horse’s coloring and body markings.

In other sessions different ideas were explored. One reclining horse had a surface of individual leaf motifs on paper. One by one, each "leaf" was sewn with wire and filament to the armature of the horse, beginning from the inside of the stomach cavern and ending with the outer shell of the body, to which the finishing layers of "leaves" were applied. From a distance, the piece transforms visually into a large pile of autumn leaves. Another smaller horse began with a wire armature skeleton over which tarlatan, a heavy-duty gauze, soaked in white glue was applied. The final layer was mold-made sheet paper which was applied in large segments while still wet. It soaked into the tarlatan's texture, cementing the paper to the armature making a sturdy, rigid paper finish. As her work progressed, she began using fibrous leaf material, paper pulp and sticks held together with wire over a metal armature as a way of solving some of these conservation issues. Many of these later organic horses are in museum collections. These are materials that Butterfield no longer uses, and these works have a special historic air to them. It is rare to see one in the marketplace.