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Deborah Butterfield Mary Stofflet and Vicki Hearne Deborah Butterfield has made sculptures of horses since the early 1970s of various materials such as mud, sticks, barbed wire, fencing, corrugated metal, and other found materials, including a wrecked airstream trailer and the remains of a pea cannery. They confront the viewer with the complexity of their formal sculptural presence, specific personality, and inner core of meaning, which, according to the artist, "isn't about horses at all." Butterfield, who was born and grew up in San Diego, developed the ideas leading to her life-size horse sculptures before moving to Montana, where she currently lives and works. Unlike the militaristic horses of western art history, Butterfield's early horses were mares, unridden and usually solitary. She has succeeded in transferring her explorations of a female sensibility into extraordiarily satisfying work that transcends but does not ignore contemporary feminist implications and artistic explorations. San Diego Museum of Art January. 72 pp., 38 illus., 29 in color, bibliog., LC 96-69294, 11" x 9" |
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