Along with her artist-husband John Buck, she divides her time between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii.

Her earliest works from the mid-1970s were made from sticks and natural detritus gathered on her property in Bozeman, Montana.

"The materials and images were meant to suggest that the horses were both figures and ground, merging external world with the subject.

The next series of horses was made of mud and sticks and suggested that its forms were left clotted together after the river flooded and subsided.

The materials and images were to suggest that the horses were both figure and ground, merging external world with the subject.

"[3] As critic Grace Glueck wrote in The New York Times in 2004, "By now Deborah Butterfield's skeletal horses, fashioned of found wood, metal and other detritus, are familiar to almost a generation of gallerygoers.

"I wanted to do these big, beautiful mares that were as strong and imposing as stallions but capable of creation and nourishing life.

[12][13] Initially constructing her sculptures using natural materials such as mud, clay and sticks in the 1970s, Butterfield has since moved to using metal in her work.