A rustic skeleton of beechwood, cast into bronze, forms the exalted body of a great horse; its body curved and relaxed, its head bent, sniffing at the ground curiously. Deborah Butterfield, in her 2002 sculpture, Lark, has used found materials to bring the most majestic of human companions to life. Inspired by the two-t.mes World Show Superhorse and Silver Spur Award winner, Rugged Lark, Butterfield captures the legendary beast in a moment of repose, displaying its graceful qualities rather than its sublime strength. The choice creates an animal that appears welcoming and kind, as if it has bent its head so that a viewer may pet its neck.

Born on the 75th annual running of the Kentucky Derby, horses are Butterfield’s birthright. Earning both her bachelor’s and master’s in Replica Handbags s from the University of California, Davis, she began experimenting with equine forms under the mentorship of the sculptor Manuel Neri, first imagining the works as metaphorical self-portraits before adopting horses as her primary subject. During her early period, she used sticks, branches, and natural debris to make sculptures that were inherently temporal due to their materials. As her career progressed, Butterfield experimented with various media in pursuit of creating more permanent works. In some sculptures, she used found scrap metal to create objects that blended the organic silhouettes of horses with the angular forms and rusted colors of industry, creating striking images that reflect the relationship between humanity and nature in an increasingly industrialized and technology-dependent world.

With Lark, Butterfield has created a permanent sculpture that returns to the naturalistic forms of her early work. Completed through a highly complex fabrication process, Butterfield begins by scavenging piles of found driftwood and sticks that are sent to the Walla Walla Foundry, where they are coated in ceramic and fired at 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, curing the molding materials while reducing the wood to ash. The molds are then cleaned, primed with hot wax, and filled with molten bronze. Once the bronze has cooled and solidified, the ceramic shells are cracked and removed. Butterfield chooses from the first round of bronze sticks, using them to construct an armature that serves as the work's scaffold; she then attaches several more non-cast pieces of wood, filling in the structure. Once her armature has been completed, it is photographed, and the newly added wood is sent to the foundry, where they are cast in bronze and eventually welded onto the scaffold. The final step in completing the sculpture is an intensive patinaing process and a wax seal that results in the bronze appearing nearly identical to the original wood (Robert Gordon, Deborah Butterfield: About the Casting Process, 2003).

Despite horses being a repeated subject throughout Western Art History, Lark and Butterfield’s other equine sculptures rarely participate in the shared themes of the canon. Where horses have historically been depicted as subservient, ridden, and dominated by nobility, Butterfield has instead removed the rider, granting her animals a proud, sublime, and real character. Though certainly having some overlap with the storied sculptures and statuettes of Isadore Bonheur, Butterfield’s choices and motifs most closely align with those of classical Chinese depictions of horses (John Yau, “Inside/Outside,” 2003).

In Lark, Butterfield further departs from the canon; traditionally, a horse’s bowed head has been used to represent defeat or exhaustion; however, rather than using the animal’s pose to express the emotions of its rider, Butterfield employs the pose to express the horse’s comfort, curiosity, and “calm thought.” Her choice individuates Lark completely, allowing each viewer to encounter the horse and form a personal relationship with it as if it were alive and breathing.