Butterfield, Beavers and Broadway
When I think of sculptural ingenuity, I often think of beavers. Beavers build their homes for form and function. Beaver dens are architectural, designed with entrances, exits and multiple rooms. The dens are also built with any materials that are nearby.
This rescued beaver - JB1 - has gone viral with multiple videos of damming up doorways with plushes and holiday decorations.
Watching JB build, objects are not just placed - but purposely placed. Placed for form, function and what feels like beauty. The individual taste of the creature building it.
Sculptures made with found objects have always been a personal favorite of mine. It tickles my creative spirit and when the sculptures move and/or tell a story (puppetry) my brain vibrates.
Finding topics that tickle and vibrate your creative brain is so important as it wakes up what is individually YOU and your voice. I’m thankful that I have many topics like this and these Substack articles are a way for me to explore them.
Here is today’s Interest Cross Section.
Found Object / Natural Object Sculpture
Horses
Remember your elementary school classmate that always ran at recess like a horse - skip galloping. That was me, I was a horse boy. I have letters from distant pen pals that say; “Wow! How did you draw that horse so well?” Obsession. Watching the Barbie Movie …. Ken’s equine awakening had my number.
This could easily turn into an article about me and horses, but I want to turn our attention to artist Deborah Butterfield.
Butterfield has focused sculpturally on the horse form for over 40 years, her medium of choice - Driftwood. What sets her work apart is when the sculpture is made in wood, it is then all taken apart and each piece individually cast in bronze then reassembled and patinaed to look like wood. A laborious effort, all for the durability of the pieces.
Here is a terrific summary and quote from the Deborah Butterfield book from Teresa Jordan’s blog.
In her essay for the 2003 book Deborah Butterfield by Robert Gordon, the Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley wrote about the “absolute horsiness” Butterfield is able to capture:
…as peaceful as if they were standing alone in a field, out of the human gaze… I have never met a horse lover who did not gasp at the truth of Butterfield’s horses, and then again at the paradox that they are made of such industrial materials, barbed wire, bronze, pieces of junked cars, discarded metal letters…. Whatever they mean, however she intended them, however they fit into contemporary art or women’s art or even into Butterfield’s life, first and foremost, they are extraordinarily right.
Smiley points out that Butterfield’s work established “an entirely new form of equine art” in that her horses are not objects for the glorification of the rider or cultural triumphalism, as in equestrian statuary and so much art of the court, the hunt, and the American West. Butterfield’s horses “ask us to look at them for themselves, not for what they do for humans. [They] are not useful animals in the traditional sense…. They are themselves—they have names and all have individual natures, expressing feelings of their own…. All of Butterfield’s horses, even the most quietly statuesque, seem to have inner lives.”
The part that connects Butterfield’s sculpting method to beavers is her description of crafting a piece and finding that a piece of drift wood often “clicks into place,” as she says and demonstrates in this video.
Intention and beauty find a way, and sometimes it’s the same thing.
In Chicago behind Engine 98 - the fire house near the Water Tower on Michigan Ave - there is a park (Seneca Park) that I played at as a kid and it features its own resident Butterfield horse, named Ben2 (1989).
Chicago has a couple Butterfield horses, but Ben was my neighbor, haha. I always enjoyed looking at him from high atop the slide or on a walk. On a recent visit, I got to visit with Ben again.
And while I thinking about Ben and how he was made via Butterfield’s bronze method, I started thinking about Ben in movement - as Butterfield’s sculptures are apt to do and my mind quickly jumped to another horse, Joey - by Handspring Puppet for the play; War Horse.
Beautifully engineered and constructed with reed, steel and leather, it is then brought to life with three performers. The performers and the materials themselves provide the realistic sounds and weight of the horse. It’s so beautiful and poetic. This level of abstraction and design set off a significant revolution in British puppetry in 2007, one that is still going strongly3. Watch this clip below to see and hear what I mean.
Handspring Puppet Company also has an amazing book about their work. I just double checked and don’t see a mention of Deborah Butterfield - so this might be the first article that makes the correlation. I love the book because it has loads of technical draftings as well as pictures of unpainted horses. In a way, the construction methods between Butterfield and Handspring are the same. Create a steel armature to build off of, and overlay the reed or driftwood.
When I first saw promotional clips in 2007, my little puppet, horse boy brain4 exploded - two things together PLUS sculpturally abstract and interesting! I was hooked. When there was a run on Broadway at Lincoln Center announced in 2010, I jumped on trying to be involved. I was invited to puppeteer auditions in NYC. The workshop was amazing, they had two horse puppets there - Joey and Topthorn - and it was an all day study sesh. It was challenging and it was fun. I’m so glad that I got to participate. In the end, no puppeteers were cast for the initial Broadway run - a future article maybe about puppetry unions. The short version of the story is that this time period was one of big change for all of Broadway puppetry representation. One that hasn’t really been resolved.
Returning to the work of Deborah Butterfield…
In art history, horses are presented with conquers, colonizers and war regalia, further these horses are often stallions (males). The work of Deborah Butterfield has always pushed against that in order to represent the horse as its own being - often focusing on mares (female) - sympathetically in their surroundings. It’s mildly interesting that the story of War Horse basically tells the story of a horse existing as a horse (beautifully represented on stage) then taken in and used as a tool of war - the name of the play itself steals individuality away from Joey. It’s Butterfield’s artist statement, in motion.
While I don’t visit Ben the horse in Seneca Park often these days, I am down the street from another Butterfield horse that I walk and drive past daily. Deborah Butterfield is prolific and it’s likely that you live near one too. There isn’t a convenient map, but search your city and her name and something will come up. 🙂
Consider subscribing for more articles and deep dives like this. Future puppet, horse and horse puppet articles are in process and I really enjoy sharing these and other stories.
JB is not named in the plush video - but is named in this Dodo documentary with more information on his rehabilitation.
Ben was donated to the park by Chicago Steak and Cheesecake baron Eli Schulman in 1988 and installed in 1990. Eli’s son Marc - also in the cheesecake biz - is on the advisory board for Seneca Park.
Handspring Puppet Co and the production of War Horse have contributed significantly to the world of puppetry and many of the artists that started with Handspring have since started their own companies with their own innovations. It’s important to say that while War Horse was a UK commission, Handspring is from and based in South Africa, where they had been creating stunning work prior. It’s truly amazing and inspiring. Get their book.
Perhaps a “Puppet Horse Boy,” would be an interesting Pinocchio show variant … or maybe that’s just Pinocchio on Pleasure Island when he has the face of a donkey.