Butterfield's stable of equine beauty

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

•	Deborah Butterfield 10 a.m to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays Noon to 4 p.m. Sundays Through July 25 Contemporary Museum 2411 Makiki Heights Drive 526-1322

Deborah Butterfield is no exception. Her medium is assemblage, a three-dimensional collage of nonart objects and materials into sculpture through combining and constructing techniques such as gluing or welding, and she has been making assemblage horses — just horses — for 31 years. This remarkable accomplishment has brought her international acclaim. Her focus on and repetition of sculpting what she loves has fine-tuned her visual vocabulary and given her equine inventions a voice. They don't neigh, they sing.

The 15 horse sculptures in the exhibit don't seem like a lot, but seven (five from the artist's collection) are life-sized or larger. Each fills a room or at least half a room. Some have rarely been seen in public. Walking around these majestic horses in this formal indoor setting takes one off guard and heightens a sense of uncertainty — a feeling that comes in handy while viewing this exhibit. A silent courting takes place. Butterfield's horses seek, through their powerful yet vulnerably lacy open constructions, to be admired.

Initially, her horses were fragile — made of mud, sticks, and straw as well as found metal. Sometimes before an opening, she says, she would feel like a piano tuner adjusting the wires in her sculptures. For this exhibit, she tightened the wires of the melancholic "Jerusalem Horse III," made of steel rod, wire and wood sticks from Jerusalem.

Her horses are stronger now and heavier, and although some still appear to be made out of tree limbs, trunks and sticks (it's hard to believe they aren't), they are cast in bronze. Weight was a minor problem in this installation because of big "Isbelle" (bronze, 89 by 108 by 40 inches). She weighs about 1,800 pounds. "The floor starting going," says Butterfield. "We had to pull her back up on a hoist and put the hind legs on a retaining wall. Then they had to go under the building and put a jack under the floor. It was really scary."

Casting these horses takes two and half months and 20 people. Butterfield has been working with the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state since 1985.

The wooden sticks are covered with nine coats of ceramic molding material. This shell is cured at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and the wood is burned away. Microcrystalline wax heated to 200 degrees is then poured into the shells until it reaches a thickness of 3/16 of an inch. "Gates" that guide the flow of metal are attached to the shells and then submerged in a plaster-based molding material. When this is set, it is fired at 1,000 degrees in a kiln and the wax is melted away. The remaining mold is removed from the kiln and filled with molten bronze. When solidified, the plaster and ceramic materials are broken away and what remains is a metal copy of the original wood stick. After Butterfield assembles the armature, more wood sticks are placed on the work to complete the form. These wood sticks are photographed, documented and removed from the armature, and then the casting process begins again.

"It's like a twice-baked potato," Butterfield says. When the second casting is complete, the horse is reassembled using the documentary photographs as guides. Butterfield usually revises the work at this stage. When she is finished, the welds and blemishes are tooled to resemble wood. The sculpture is sandblasted and the coloring process begins. She heats the work to 200 degrees and then sprays a combination of white pigments and chemicals on the metal. Many coats of this patina are applied before the piece is finally sealed with heated wax. And for all of this effort, the sculpture looks exactly as it began — like a horse made out of beautiful scraps of wood.

Butterfield's love of horses began as a child and has never faltered. Born in 1949, the day that Ponder won the Kentucky Derby, she was obsessed with pony rides. Initially, she thought she might become a veterinarian. Then, during her studies at University of California-Davis (she graduated with both bachelors' and master's degrees in fine arts), she decided she wanted to become an artist because she was so impressed by her teachers: ceramicist Robert Arneson and painters William T. Wiley, Wayne Thiebauld and Roy De Forest. During this time, she lived on a thoroughbred farm. Butterfield bought one of the mares and using her as a model, made her first plaster sculpture 1972.

"Everyone was making contemporary and conceptual art," she says. "For me to do a plaster horse was really so dopey and traditional that it was almost radical. It took nerve and a lot of guts to do it."

She saw these sculptures as feminist art. "I made the early pieces, the mares, during the Vietnam War," says Butterfield. "They were allegorical and metaphorical self-portraits. One aspect of a horse is that it is a weapon and whoever controlled the horse could dominate the world throughout history. But my horses were mares, and mares were not used for war horses. I felt that was a way of making a statement."

What is amazing about Butterfield's work is her ability to communicate her consummate affection for her subject. "Rondo" stands 79 by 94 by 31 inches — a welded, found steel poem, a eulogy to one of her horses. How can something as clunky as old, rounded rusty car parts (fenders, running boards, carburetor and radiator grills) be transformed into something so elegantly poignant?

"Rondo died of a broken leg," says Butterfield. You can see which leg was broken. "The name also refers to a musical theme that keeps circling and coming back to itself."

"Ferdinand," the title of her big red chestnut sculpture, is a double entendre, named after the French cubist painter Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and the chestnut horse Ferdinand that won the Kentucky Derby in 1986. The found steel is red, and there is a large letter "c" in the croup, "e" in the belly and "v" in the neck of the sculpture, vocative of Léger's industrialized abstract compositions.

We are fortunate to be able to see some of her earlier works such as "Three Horses" (1980) made of mud, twigs, steel and chicken wire and "Untitled" (1976) made of mud and sticks. These pieces have a raw, primitive earthiness and illustrate the hurdles Butterfield has jumped in expanding her creative vision.

Butterfield divides her time between Bozeman, Mont., and Holualoa on the Big Island. She is a wife and the mother of two boys, owns seven horses and competes in dressage, a form of exhibition riding.

In Montana, she has 700 tons of steel spread out on a half acre, and another half acre of wood and sticks in crates and containers. "I'm like a bag lady," says Butterfield. "I go through hundreds of sticks for every one I actually decide to use."

"For the pieces I make," she writes, "the gesture is really more within the body, it's like an internalized gesture, which is more about the content, the state of mind or being at a given instant."

A recent release of the first major academic survey of her work, titled "Deborah Butterfield" and published by Harry N. Abrams, is on sale in the gift shop. Organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum, from here Butterfield's sculpture stable will travel to museums in Florida, Louisiana, New York, Tennessee and Arizona.