American, b. 1949, San Diego, California
Lives and works in Bozeman, Montana and the Big Island of Hawaii

Deborah Butterfield's sculptural forms are based on her kindred spirits, horses. Her freestanding sculptures are constructed of tree branches or scrap metal found amongst local ranches, and are then sometimes cast in bronze.

With no sketches or maquettes, Butterfield works directly with her found materials to build gentle life-sized horses, from mare to filly scale. Discards from the ranch become armaments that are realistic and spiritually charged shapes of horses' bodies. Unlike historic martial and monumental equine sculptors she explores the interior lives of horses rather than as extensions of human mobility.

Deborah Butterfield sculptures breathe life into more than 70 public museum and sculpture garden collections throughout the United States. Among them are the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, MN, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.