About Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield is an American sculptor.  She is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, and especially pieces of wood.

Butterfield’s work has been exhibited widely and there is demand among art collectors for her sculptures. Her earliest works from the mid-1970s were made from sticks and natural detritus gathered on her property in Bozeman, Montana.

“The materials and images were meant to suggest that the horses were both figures and ground, merging external world with the subject.”  She began crafting horses out of scrap metal and cast bronze in the early 1980s. She would sculpt a piece using wood and other materials fastened together with wire, then photograph the piece from all angles so as to be able to reassemble the piece in metal.