Isaac Weston

Isaac came to this late and entirely on purpose. He trained as a chef, was running kitchens by his early twenties, and spent the back half of that career in London, including a stretch in Marco Pierre White’s restaurants and a Notting Hill room called Dakota. Lara was managing restaurants of her own. Then he left food altogether and spent 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. Patina is chemistry you cannot fully govern: you measure, you test, you wait, and you hand the last of it over to heat and air and time. He has shown at Tauranga’s Incubator Gallery, Matter Gallery and The Mandarin Tree, and the work has been in magazines and on television.

In 2024 four large-scale works went permanently into the SkyCity Horizon Hotel in Auckland, and in 2026 another went to Coronet Ridge Resort in Queenstown. At NZ Sculpture OnShore in 2025 he sold the lot.

Closer to home his work stands in public gardens at the Historic Village, Tauranga Racecourse and Te Puna Quarry Park. The wall art goes out as Isaac Weston Artist and everything else as Re.Work.It. He keeps the working day to five or six hours, deliberately, on the grounds that this is a marathon and he intends to still be enjoying it in ten years.