Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield was born in San Diego, California in 1949. Since 1973 she has concentrated on assembling her sculpture from junk materials, defining her skills as a true constructivist. Since 1979 she has taught sculpture at Montana State University, Bozeman, where she also raises and trains horses. She is married to the artist John Buck, an Iowa native who is a sculptor-printmaker--and they have two sons. She is actively involved in dressage (the art of exhibition riding or horsemanship in which the horse is controlled in certain difficult steps and gaits by very slight movements of the rider) that exemplifies for her the importance of communication in the training of an animal by a human.