I am a UK-based self-employed Art Technician, who travels around my local region to different galleries and museums to install art exhibitions.
Sometimes I handle famous and expensive artworks or priceless artifacts, but most of the time it's probably artworks you've not heard of. This includes 2D work like paintings, 3D work like sculptures, video projections, screens, sound systems, computers, and room-filling installations. Sometimes we work directly with living artists to help produce their work.
Happy to talk about technical stuff i.e. how artworks are transported, packed, fixed to the wall, what sort of fittings are used, how an exhibition is spaced out, hung, arranged etc; or to talk about working in galleries, or any questions from artists about how to prepare works for exhibition etc
I'm also a practicing artist, and historically both a filmmaker and gallery curator - so happy to answer things relating to that sort of thing too.
Because it's a pretty niche job I may have to keep some details vague for privacy etc.
I'm doing a public talk fairly soon on "what I do", and I need to know what sort of things people are potentially interested in, so I can focus more on those in the talk - so any relevant questions would be really helpful to me, thank you.
Student works!
Though people tend to be more impressed when you say you've installed works by Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso etc - I also install works by students and local artists etc, and the hardest ones are always the college ones.
The thing about a well known historical work is that they want you to handle it as little as possible, so ahead of it arriving on site, you should know exactly how large it is, exactly what fittings are being used with it and so on.
Sometimes the area is prepped in advance, and with template or measurements, potentially the holes in the wall are pre-piloted - so when it comes to install, the work is opened/unwrapped (under observation) and moved once to a table for condition checking (are there any scratches, marks, cracks etc that weren't there previously, and agreeing that "this is the state of the work" at the start of the exhibition (to track any possible damage or change in surface during the exhibition).
The work is then carefully lifted into place and fixed to the wall, along with whatever security measures deemed necessary - all in all, it's ready prepared to be installed, it's been installed before and you know exactly how it's going up. It's handled as little as possible and you know exactly what you're doing with it.
By comparison, for a student exhibition, someone walks into the room dragging a 5 metre long piece of paper and says "can I like... fix this to the ceiling?" or "I've been doing paintings on slabs of concrete - can I like... sellotape it to the wall or something" and you have to invent a solution.
that's fascinating, thanks for the insight!