Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you know everything about contemporary art with your smoky theories and your openings where you pretend to understand what you are looking at. But have you really taken the time to observe Deborah Butterfield’s ghostly horses? Those spectral creatures who stare at us with their empty eye sockets as if to remind us of our own fragility in the face of passing time?
In her Montana studio, far from the New York spotlight, this American sculptor born in 1949 has been shaping horses for nearly half a century that defy all classification. Horses that are not horses, but meticulous assemblies of dead branches, metal debris, and more recently patinated bronze perfectly imitating driftwood. Skeletal equines that seem to have crossed the ages to come haunt us.
When I contemplate these sculptures, I can’t help but think of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, that aesthetic of impermanence and imperfection which celebrates the beauty of the passage of time. Butterfield’s horses perfectly embody this Eastern philosophy that sees in wear and decay a superior form of beauty [1]. Her sculptures are never smooth or perfect; they bear the scars of time, the marks of erosion, the patina of weathering. Each twisted branch, each piece of rusted metal tells a story of survival and resilience.
Wabi-sabi teaches us that nothing is permanent, nothing is complete, nothing is perfect. Butterfield’s horses are memento mori, poetic reminders of our own mortality. They stand before us, graceful and fragile, both present and absent, like materialized ghosts. The artist herself acknowledges this metaphysical dimension: “These first horses were enormous plaster mares whose presence was extremely gentle and calm. They were at rest, and in complete opposition to the raging war horse (the stallion) which represents most equestrian sculptures.”
But don’t be mistaken. These assemblages are not mere nostalgic evocations of an idealized nature. They carry a sharp critique of our relationship with the natural world. When Butterfield uses metal debris, pieces of abandoned farm equipment, or fragments of fences to build her horses, she confronts us directly with the consequences of industrialization and American expansion. The horse, once central to Western economy and culture, was rendered obsolete by machines. And here the artist uses precisely the remnants of this industrialization to give new life to the animal it replaced. What biting irony!
This ecological approach is particularly striking in her series inspired by the 2011 Japanese tsunami. In “Three Sorrows,” Butterfield recovered debris that crossed the Pacific from Japan to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Crushed helmets, children’s toys, toothbrushes… The artist transformed these tragic relics into a poignant commemorative monument. The horse becomes the very altar, the silent witness of a catastrophe that claimed nearly 20,000 lives.
This artistic recycling work fits perfectly within the tradition of Arte Povera, the Italian movement from the 1960s that rejected noble materials in favor of poor and everyday elements [2]. Like Jannis Kounellis exhibiting his live horses at Galleria L’Attico in Rome in 1969, Butterfield uses the animal as a powerful political and existential symbol. But while Kounellis provoked by the real presence and smell of the horses, Butterfield moves us through their spectral absence, through these skeletons that are only the trace, the imprint of a vanished presence.
Because there is something undeniably ghostly about these sculptures. They evoke sun-bleached bones that one might discover in the desert, carcasses abandoned after a forest fire, skeletons unearthed from an archaeological site. Art critic C.L. Morrison understood this well when she wrote: “I personally see these animals as symbols of suffering. Covered in mud, caged and woven with heavy and rough sticks that follow the structure of each leg, weigh down the tail, cross over the nose.” Each sculpture is both a celebration of animal life and a meditation on its fragility.
It is interesting to note that Butterfield considers her horses as disguised self-portraits. “I initially used images of horses as a metaphorical substitute for myself; it was a way to make a self-portrait at a degree removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield,” she confides. At the time she began her career, in the 1970s, feminist art was in full swing. Artists like Judy Chicago or Ana Mendieta claimed the female body as a political territory. Butterfield, for her part, chooses a subtler but equally powerful path.
By sculpting mares instead of stallions, she makes a radical reversal of the equestrian sculptural tradition, traditionally dominated by images of men on horseback, symbols of martial power and domination. “I wanted to make these large and beautiful mares who were as strong and imposing as stallions but capable of creating and nurturing life. It was a very personal feminist statement,” she explains. Butterfield’s mares are not war mounts but autonomous creatures, often at rest, in postures that suggest vulnerability as much as strength.
This gendered dimension of her work is often overlooked by critics, too busy marveling at the artist’s technical virtuosity. Yet it is essential to understanding the political scope of these seemingly so peaceful sculptures. By choosing to represent her horses without riders, Butterfield symbolically frees the animal from human domination, just as she asserts, as a female artist, her independence in an art world still largely dominated by men.
Butterfield’s technique is unique and sophisticated. Since the 1980s, she has developed a complex creative process involving a true transfiguration of materials. She begins by collecting branches and driftwood that she meticulously assembles to form a horse. This original sculpture is then photographed from all angles, then dismantled piece by piece. Each branch is molded and cast in bronze, then patinated to exactly reproduce the appearance of the original wood. Finally, the bronze pieces are welded together, rigorously following the original composition.
This technical alchemy where the natural becomes artificial while preserving the natural appearance is reminiscent of the experiments of Giuseppe Penone, the Italian artist who cast trees in bronze to reveal their internal structure. Like him, Butterfield plays with this fine boundary between nature and culture, between the living and the inert, between the ephemeral and the permanent. Art critic John Yau perfectly sums up this tension: “One might say that Butterfield’s horses are survivors. Despite the troubled contemporary world they inhabit, they have managed to endure and, to some extent, to thrive.”
But this transmutation of wood into bronze is not to everyone’s liking among critics. Some, like Ken Johnson of The New York Times, see it as a betrayal of the original spirit of the work: “Cast in bronze, Ms. Butterfield’s sculptures ring false, materially luxurious but aesthetically weakened simulations of the original constructions.” It is true that this evolution toward bronze coincided with growing institutional and commercial recognition of the artist. Her works, now more durable and therefore more collectible, have found their way into the largest American museums and important private collections.
This tension between artistic integrity and commercial success is not unique to Butterfield, of course. But it raises important questions about the evolution of a work over time and the compromises artists are sometimes forced to make. In Butterfield’s case, the shift to bronze can be interpreted as a desire to perpetuate her work, to give it a permanence that natural materials could not offer. But in doing so, has she not sacrificed some of the authenticity and precariousness that were the strength of her early works?
Seph Rodney from Hyperallergic expresses this ambivalent feeling well: “The horses seem fragile, barely assembled, but made in bronze instead of bleached driftwood, they will stand in an office lobby for centuries, and will probably outlive us all”. Bronze transforms these seemingly vulnerable creatures into enduring monuments, perhaps contradicting their initial message about fragility and impermanence.
But perhaps it is precisely in this contradiction that the strength of Butterfield’s work lies. Her horses are embodied paradoxes: they seem both solid and fragile, natural and artificial, present and absent, alive and dead. They speak to us of our contradictory desire to preserve nature while dominating it, of our nostalgia for a pre-industrial world while enjoying the benefits of technology.
More than mere representations of animals, Butterfield’s sculptures are profound meditations on our ambiguous relationship with the natural world, on our own mortality, and on the possibility of beauty in imperfection and decay. They remind us that everything that lives will eventually die, but that in this inevitable end perhaps lies the greatest poetry.
Because it is indeed poetry that Deborah Butterfield is about. A poetry of matter, where each branch, each piece of metal becomes a line, a verse in a three-dimensional poem. A poetry of time, where the marks of erosion and wear tell stories more eloquent than smooth and perfect surfaces. A poetry of absence, where that which is not there, flesh, muscles, life, becomes more present than what is materially visible.
So, go beyond appearances, as suggested by the title of her recent exhibition at UC Davis: “P.S. These are not horses”. These horses are not horses, but metaphors, ghosts, traces. They are what remains when everything else has disappeared. And in a world obsessed with novelty and perfection, isn’t that exactly what we need? Works that remind us of the beauty of what passes, of what transforms, of what persists despite everything.
- Koren, Leonard. Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. Imperfect Publishing, 2008.
- Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. Arte Povera. Phaidon Press, 1999.
