Woodrow, Deborah Butterfield sculpture, bronze, 1988, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 2008, all photos © 2008 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
I was thinking of Novelty Pets when I photographed this Deborah Butterfield sculpture at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden yesterday. When she created the sculpture in 1988, she named the horse, Woodrow.
The inscription on the plaque reads:
In the 1970’s I made horses out of real mud and sticks. They were, in part, meant to reflect how much a horse is part of his environment. I combined the figure and the ground.
–Deborah Butterfield
I also found the Horse Colors site. It has not been officially launched but is fun just the same. For all the horse lovers out there.
-related links: Interview With Deborah Butterfield on Art!Space – Jackson Hole, Fall 2006, Deborah Butterfield Horses Grace Park Avenue Malls on NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Fall 2005
-related to post, White Elephants On Art
-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, January 6th, 2008
These are most interesting sculptures.
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I want to add that the Art!Space – Jackson Hole Interview with Deborah Butterfield is excellent (the link is at the end of the post). It’s really worth the read.
The Art!Space Jackson Hole website (LINK) is pretty cool, too. Check out their shows.
Here are a couple of quotes from that Butterfield interview:
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This sculpture really worth seeing. I love it.
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It is raw and wild, and it seems to be built with the very type of scrub and brush that horses roam in. It’s fabulous!
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That sculpture is really cool! 😀
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wildstorm & undercanopy, thanks for stopping by. BTW, I love your names.
Thanks, LB. ybonesy, yes, isn’t it great how she builds them with materials from the environment? She says mostly metals now. But originally in wood and mud.
The interview has a photograph of her welding next to one of her horses. I wasn’t able to find measurements on Woodrow, but he appears to be life-size when you are standing near him.
Have you ever done any welding as it relates to art? I had to take a shop class in art school where we learned about all kinds of ways to build, mold metal, cast, weld. I found I wasn’t that good at those things. I’m not sure why. (I might have even singed a few hairs off my body that semester!)
I did end up making a metal rattle that I kind of liked. Maybe I just didn’t give myself enough time to learn or get comfortable. Or I was a little fearful of the gas and fire.
But I found learning about the processes to be fascinating. I gained a whole new respect for people who work with fire and metal.
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What a fabulous sculpture! I understand the bronze for longevity, but love the idea of making them of more ‘found’ materials, like the wood.
Speaking of horse colors:
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bloomgal, I was thinking the same thing about the older wood and found materials in Butterfield’s horses. I’ve never seen any of her original work (that I remember). But as I’m thinking about it, I may have. I think the wood horses would have done well in museums where the temperature and elements are controlled. That’s what makes me wonder if maybe I had seen one in a museum a long time ago. It’s possible she still gets personal commissions for those for people’s homes.
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[…] materials such as barbed wire, pipes, and fencing into her horse sculptures. She first composed Woodrow (1988) in pieces of wood, disassembled the sculpture, and reassembled the horse in bronze. The tension […]
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