Since the 1970s, Deborah Butterfield has been on the artistic scene exclusively sculpting beautiful and slightly haunting horses.

Born in 1949 in San Diego, Butterfield received her MFA in 1973 from UC Davis - along with other artistic greats such as Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson - and began her horse-filled sculptural journey.

When she first began sculpting her horses, Butterfield used wood, sticks and mud that she collected outdoors to “draw” her horses. She finds “stray, downed pieces of wood” and uses the natural lines to create the unique contours and characteristics of each horse. She builds, or “draws,” the gestural energy of each horse from the inside out, making them both skeletal and muscular.

Deborah’s sole body of work is contained in these hauntingly realistic found object impersonations of majestic and natural creatures, like 1988’s Woodrow. When she originally began sculpting these horses, she saw them as a “metaphorical substitute… a self-portrait one step removed from the specificity” of Deborah Butterfield.  These horses and their unique personalities are able to represent all the different aspects of Butterfield without the necessity of the humanness of herself.

Once she moved to a ranch in Montana in 1977, she began experimenting and transitioning to found steel and scrap metal to build her horses. While still “drawing” her horses using wood, she burns this wood away to create a bronze sculpture. In this act of burning away the wood skeleton and crafting these implausible self-portraits, Butterfield refers to, and ultimately describes, her sculptures as “ghosts”, becoming the spectral likenesses of horses, their materials and even Deborah Butterfield herself.