A sheet of flat steel doesn’t look like much. It’s only once it’s been cut, shaped, layered, and welded, sometimes feather by feather, that it starts to look like something that could fly. That transformation, from raw material to living form, is what happens in our Wanaka workshop every time a new commission begins.
Custom metal sculpture has become a genuine art form in New Zealand. At Metalworks Wanaka, every piece we make sits at the intersection of engineering and story – built to last for decades and built to mean something to the person who commissioned it.
No two commissions start the same way. Some clients arrive with a fully formed idea; others bring only a feeling – a place, a memory, a bird they’ve always admired. One of our recent pieces, Eminence, began as a spousal gift: a client wanting to honour the kārearea, New Zealand’s fiercest raptor and reigning Bird of the Year, standing 2.5 metres tall on a forged steel perch Custom Metal Sculptures.
Before any steel is cut, we ask the questions that shape everything downstream: Where will this Custom Metal Sculpture live? Will it be seen up close or from across a garden? Should it move with the wind or hold perfectly still? What does it need to mean to the people who’ll walk past it every day? Custom Metal Sculptures?
Once the brief takes shape, design vision from Steve Rumore is translated into precise CAD modelling work led by Ietje Beets, mapping out proportion, balance, and silhouette long before fabrication begins. For a kinetic piece like Updraft, this stage is where physics and art meet: every wing has to be shaped not just to look right, but to catch the wind correctly, with a counterweight matched individually to each bird so it moves in true balance. No two Updraft sculptures move quite the same way.
Material choice isn’t just aesthetic – it’s a decision about how a piece will age in New Zealand’s climate. We work primarily in three custom metal sculptures:
Corten steel, prized for the natural rust patina it develops over time — low maintenance, and it settles into a landscape rather than sitting on top of it
Mild steel, versatile and suited to custom finishes
Stainless steel, corrosion-resistant and a strong choice for coastal or high-exposure sites
Corten in particular has become something of a signature – you’ll see it in the layered, textured plinth beneath Outreach, where what looks like richly grained, bark-covered timber is, on close inspection, entirely forged steel. Every ridge of grain was individually shaped and welded to feel hewn from the forest rather than the workshop.
This is the slowest, most exacting stage – precision cutting, forming, MIG and TIG welding, and hours of grinding and refining, carried out by our fabrication team, including Maddy Riorda, Cody Brett, Zephyr Kenderdine, and Sam Cleary. On a large-scale piece, this can mean hand-shaping and layering hundreds of individual steel feathers, each placed with an eye for how it will catch the light.
Structural integrity matters just as much as appearance. A 2.5-metre sculpture standing outdoors year-round has to withstand wind, weather, and time – which means every fixing point and support is engineered with the same care as the visible form.
Some pieces are left to weather naturally – Corten sculptures are designed for this, developing richer colour and character with every season outdoors. Others are blackened, painted, or powder-coated, depending on the setting and the look a client wants. The right finish isn’t a final flourish; it’s a decision made early, because it shapes how the whole piece will read in ten or twenty years.
Even our largest pieces are engineered to flat-pack for shipping – a purpose-built process refined over years of sending sculptures throughout New Zealand, to Australia, and internationally. Size has never been the limiting factor; distance isn’t either.
A custom metal sculpture isn’t a trend – it’s a long-term design statement, built from steel that’s meant to outlast the people who commissioned it. If there’s a place, a creature, or a feeling you’d like to see rendered permanently in steel, we’d love to talk about a commission of your own.