Copper · Salt · Acid · Sunlight
Nothing here
is painted.
Every colour on this page was grown. Isaac Weston salts a sheet of copper, leaves it out in the Tauranga sun, and comes back days later to see what the weather made. Sometimes it is the blue he wanted. Sometimes it is better. It is never the same twice.
Selected work
Metal that kept moving.
Copper, steel and aluminium, all of it finished and hanging in the Matua gallery as you read this. There is no print run behind any of it. The one in the photograph is the one that arrives.
All 30 works
The reaction
Copper
keeps a diary.
Salt goes on, then acid, then the sheet goes out into the weather and Isaac stops being the one in charge of it. What comes back is a record of those days: where the sun sat, where the rain ran, where the metal decided to bloom. It has not finished. It is simply moving too slowly for you to catch it.
It is also why he cannot make you a matching pair. Drag the timeline and watch one surface travel the whole road, from bare metal to the black that takes twenty years to arrive.
Day one
Bare metal
Cut, hammered, and still just metal. Nothing has happened to it yet.
01
It used to heat somebody’s showers
Most of this copper has already had a working life inside a hot water cylinder. A plumber pulls it out, Isaac takes it off his hands, and it turns up in Matua dented, scratched and already interesting.
02
Then it gets hit
Hammer, shears, punch, until the sheet has a landscape on it. That landscape settles everything that follows, because the salts pool in the hollows and the sun only reaches the ridges.
03
Then he checks the forecast
Sun drives the reaction. Rain stops it. A week of grey and nothing happens at all, so he works to the sky rather than a schedule, with three or four pieces going and none of them in a hurry.
In place
It changes the room it’s in.
Patina answers the light, so the piece you hang in the morning is not quite the piece you walk past at dusk. A photograph flattens all of that into one fixed moment. If you would rather be sure, send Isaac a picture of your wall and he will put the work on it to scale, for nothing, before you spend anything.
Starlight · 800mm · copper and patina 
Obsidian Flow · 560mm · black patina 
Giant Manta Ray · 1400mm · outdoor 
Autumn Drift · 1200 × 800mm
Where the work lives
Hotels, quarries, racecourses, and a lot of living rooms.
Before the copper
He was a chef.
Kitchens in Auckland, then London, a few of those years in Marco Pierre White’s restaurants, where he also met Lara. Then seventeen years as a travel consultant, sending other people somewhere better.
The turn came quietly. In his forties he made a sundial for the garden, then a couple of columns out of railway sleepers and copper he had lying about. Family admired them. Friends of family asked for one. By the time he thought to call it a business, the orders had already started.
The kitchen turned out to be the right apprenticeship. You measure, you test, you wait, and you hand the last of it over to heat and air and time.
“Thick copper. Hammered surfaces. Deliberate indents. Each piece carries a past life: reclaimed copper with its own history, marks and all. It’s not silky smooth, and that’s exactly the point.”
Isaac Weston, nine years a full-time artist
Meet the artist
Commissions
A reaction run
for your wall.
Tell him the wall, the light it gets and the feeling you are after. He will tell you what the copper will probably do and what it will flatly refuse to do. The shape is yours to choose. The colour never is.
Start a conversation