About

AE Hardware, designed in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, is the product of five years’ research and development, prototyping, and laboratory testing.

Our ethos guides every aspect of design, manufacturing and day-to-day operations:

Conserve
Our founding principle is to reduce the risk of damage to art objects. The hardware provides an entirely non-contact ecosystem for works of art in transit, and sets new benchmarks for performance and reliability across a wide range of art logistics and conservation practices.

Failsafe
Artist Engineering has conducted an unprecedented program of laboratory and practical tests to validate the safety of the hardware. Beyond mechanical performance, the hardware is also designed and tested to be foolproof — unlike other fixtures, it is almost impossible to use incorrectly, significantly reducing risk.

Innovate
Art hardware is still largely produced with technologies, materials and processes dating back to the 1800s. Artist Engineering looked to climbing hardware (carabiners, pulleys, belay systems) to emulate their standards of performance, and borrowed from its vast history of material choices, construction, refinement and technology. In both fields, the stakes are incredibly high, and parts must interlock with a 0% chance of failure.

Simplicity
The typical fate of an apparatus that attempts to combine a wide array of functionalities is to become a contraption. This is inelegant, but also a risk: if the device is hard to use, it is easy to use incorrectly. AE Hardware was 5 years in R+D partly because simplicity is difficult to achieve — the system is universal, widely applicable, and reduced to as few elements as possible.

Reduce/Reuse
Artist Engineering hardware negates the need for nitrile, cotton or latex gloves during handling and polyethylene foam during staging, reducing waste from these single-use, mostly petrochemical-derived materials. AE Grips and AE Clips are universal and detachable. They can be easily shared or re-circulated between artworks and collections, minimising the amount of hardware that you need to buy and the amount that needs to be manufactured.

Longevity
The hardware is designed, manufactured and tested to last. Make once, make well.

OH&S
Preparators are subjected to significant physical strain and risk of injury over their careers. The hardware is designed with the health and safety of preparators in mind, reducing the risk of injury by providing a significantly more ergonomic method for handling artworks.

Collaborate
Conservation is built on shared knowledge and a common goal. AE Hardware would not exist without our collaborations with an international group of preparators, conservators, artists, registrars and engineers who have contributed their time, knowledge and experience.

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